Review of Tár (Todd Field, 2022)
The mismatch between the life of someone brilliant, intelligent, formidable and a tour-de-force, and the private life which houses the residue, the flaws, the duplicitous narratives and a sense of a character in freefall, is what makes Todd Field’s ‘Tár’ such a dazzling and overwhelming drama. A biopic of a fictional lead conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and of international renown, Cate Blanchett gives the performance of a career as a narcissist who grooms young, talented girls only to spurn them after they have outlived their usefulness.
Cancel culture is also a mainstay of this unflattering portrait of a powerhouse talent in which the adulation and esteem in the public sphere is afforded its opposite in the way that cracks have already started to appear in the private veneer when Blanchett flies too close to the sky and comes crashing down to earth when legal suits, protests against her work and accusations of malfeasance rear their head — but, true to form, Tár thinks she can ignore them even when her entourage and sponsors have long since realized that Tár’s career is unsalvageable. The upended and dissonant nature of this character study of a bruised composer is typified by the way in which Field opts to begin his film with the full end credits right at the start of the picture, so that it is a good ten minutes before we are given a glimpse as to the direction of travel this assault on audience convention is headed.
As a genre, ‘Tár’ is difficult to pin down, with a sense of dread and menace pervading the apartment where Tár lives with her wife and daughter as books mysteriously go missing and footsteps or an almost imperceptible rustling while Tár goes on a run through the park, making ‘Tár’ a horror movie in which it is the ghosts of her past which assault her mental wellbeing, until she turns up to work, teaching gifted musicians, with a black eye and a face covered in bruises. Her past may come back to haunt her, but Lydia Tár does not confront her demons in the way the arrogant, young medical students do in ‘Flatliners’ when they end up making peace with their past lives as bullies and tormentors, but, rather, she carries on in the only way she knows how, oblivious to all the entreaties to her to show some sensitivity and acknowledge the pain she habitually leaves in her wake.
The fact that some of the accusations against her have been manifestly distorted adds to the complexity of a woman both victim and unrepentant abuser. She may be a female composer, but everything about Tár is masculine, from the trouser suits she wears when conducting to the way she threatens a little girl who is bullying her own daughter at school by introducing herself as Petra’s father. Tár is not just a male surrogate, she outmanoeuvres and colonizes all spaces around her, and is a demonic, restless force of nature whose use of the baton is charged with violence (in one scene of dark comedy she literally uses the conducting baton in front of a live audience to beat up the man waiting in the wings to inherit her crown). ‘Tár’ is an hypnotic film which dares to redraw the very edifice of what comprises a screen biopic.
