Tár opens with the acknowledgements and credits. The names of the thousands of people who helped make the film appear on a black screen, as if it were just ending. We viewers are not used to sitting through all the credits, yet this film is announcing that it is different, and it is going to control every aspect of what you hear and see. I loved all two hours and thirty-seven minutes of it. It’s a film about power and it is powerfully made, about a tyrant and how one must become a tyrant to be an artist.
‘Service the composer—supplement yourself, your ego and yes, even your identity’, Tár says to a surly student early on in the film. The film follows world-famous (fictional) conductor and composer Lydia Tár during the weeks running up to her live recording of a Mahler symphony at the Berlin Philharmonic. She has meetings, she goes home to her wife and daughter, she watches auditions, she writes music, she fires people, she gives talks and lectures—everywhere she goes she commands respect and always a hint of fear.
Cate Blanchett is inseparable from her character—we are watching Tár, not Cate Blanchett, who is undoubtedly one of the best actors of our times. I want to watch on repeat the moments when she is conducting. I don’t know or care if her conducting method is realistic—she is the conductor we all want to be, letting loose the sound of the strings and the horns and the drums like a god sending a storm. She doesn’t just keep time, she controls it.
There are no boring bits in this film. Even the lunch meetings are taut, exhilarating. Here is a woman and an artist in total control of her life and of the lives of many others, and it’s the latter that becomes a problem. Word begins to spread that a former student of Tár’s, named Krista, has killed herself. Krista’s emails must all be deleted. Make sure it happens, Tár tells her PA. Krista’s name forms an anagram for ‘AT RISK’. Don’t tell Prince Harry, that would just reinforce his own misplaced devotion to anagrams.
On the surface, Tár’s life looks like the artists’ dream—she has the top job in her industry, she shares work and a home life with a loving partner, has a stunning, elegant flat in central Berlin plus a chic ‘bolthole’ where she can go to be alone and write music uninterrupted, she has written a memoir, she is universally admired and acclaimed.
Yet from the beginning her interactions with young women bear a sinister quality. She admires a young woman’s handbag after a lecture—admires it a little too much, which her PA glimpses from across the room. You know how her PA feels about her from the first glance. A young cellist auditions for Tár’s orchestra and in her Tár finds her next muse. She changes the live recording to Elgar, which she knows the cellist can play without equal. Tár ousts the old guard without ceremony, populating her world with favourites and people who owe her favours, while her wife watches from her place at first violin.
Underlings seek her performance notes, her secrets, her advice, her favour. She’s flattered but bored with their lack of talent. Will her attractive PA become the next assistant conductor? Can Tár tolerate another ambitious woman on the rise? Tár’s talent has brought her to the pinnacle, the head conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic but she can’t seem to rest there. She must control every aspect of her life and art, and that means controlling people.
Tár’s control over other people takes weird forms. A lesser film would beat the abuse topic over the head, as it were. Here abuse is subtle, much too subtle to call out. Tár comes home with a ravaged face—she was attacked, she tells her wife, who dotes over her injuries and their previous argument is forgotten. The viewer knows Tár wasn’t attacked. Why does she lie to her wife? What’s the benefit here? Subtle control of the narrative. No matter what happens to her, Tár can reframe it. She can control what other people think has happened.
Nevertheless things begin to unravel for Tár. Her own metronome, locked away in her study, goes rogue and starts ticking on its own. She can no longer control time. The film is brilliant on psychological disorder and breakdown. As Tár’s paranoia grows, mundane things like the repetitive beep of a doorbell take on new significance. The neighbour downstairs keeps knocking at Tár’s door looking for her mother’s newspaper. Just annoying everyday aspects of city living, yet with her sensitivity to sound these unpredictable disturbances exacerbate her anxious state.
This is also the effect that social media and emails have. How can we sit with our own thoughts when at any moment we might receive a hate message in our pockets? Or news that we’ve been fired? Or that we’re being sued? Or that someone has died? Instant access, instant availability. No wonder anxiety is trending.
This film isn’t hard to watch though. It is mesmerising, magnificent. I sat on the edge of my seat for all two hours and thirty-seven minutes. I brought a sack of popcorn to the cinema in my handbag and I didn’t even open it.
Check out more Entertainment Now movie news, reviews and interviews here.
