TAR: The Most Relevant Movie of 2022
Featured on Brown Film Magazine
This February, I had the pleasure of attending the Santa Barbara International Film Festival through the SBIFF Film Studies Program. Every event I attended was eye-opening, insightful, and engaging and my favorite event was Cate Blanchett’s Outstanding Performance of the Year Award where I saw her engage in an intimate Q&A where she spoke about her career, process, and aspirations. Blanchett starred in Todd Field’s magnificent 2022 film, TÁR, and watching TÁR only a few hours prior to seeing Blanchett in the flesh and blood was a very inspiring juncture. I enjoyed all that I saw at the festival, but TÁR stood out like no other. Being able to gaze upon the masterpiece that Field (who was present at many SBIFF events) wrote, directed, and produced on the gorgeous screen at the Arlington Theater on State Street was magical.
Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the conductor of a prominent German Orchestra, is at the peak of her career as she's writing both a book and a much-expected live enactment of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. She has worked with orchestras in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York. Lydia and her wife, a concertmaster, Sharon (Nina Hoss), have a young adopted daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic). When Lydia is accused of sexual assault, her life begins to untwist in a meticulous course.
We are introduced to Lydia through an interview with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who deferentially plays himself. Gopnik’s almost robotic introduction of Lydia’s accomplishments signals that she is a woman so influential and so important she needs no curtain-raiser. She is an EGOT winner, a Harvard graduate, and a conductor who proclaims Leonard Berstein as her teacher and mentor. But TÁR is not a biopic because Lydia Tár is fictitious. TÁR does not follow a typical musical biopic narrative that follows a young Lydia from how her small triumphs turned into huge successes. We do not see Lydia’s rise. Only her fall from grace. This film sings its first note at the crux of her career and follows her like a hawk so that we see how every decision she makes builds her own destruction.
Field is a master at creating feelings of distress and suspense. It feels as though the film wants the conductor to let the symphony end. Toward the beginning of the film, Lydia receives an unknown gift — a marked early edition of Vita Sackville-West’s novel “Challenge” — that she throws away in an airplane bathroom. Bizarre sounds at home disrupt her rest and divert her from her job. A visual symbol, a maze, appears mysteriously in weird situations, and Lydia’s reactions to this symbol are even more bizarre. This unsettling feeling is established right at the start and only intensifies, thanks to Field’s mise-en-scene, color palette, and cinematography. The film feels cold, sterile, and expensive. The psychological essence is reminiscent of a Kubrick film. Its dark comedic edge follows the path of PTA. And, despite all of this, we remain tied to one question: Who is Lydia?
As we witness Lydia’s very internal, secretive paranoia increase, there are increasing troubles at home and at her job. Lydia is married to Sharon, the Philharmonic’s first violinist. They have adopted a young daughter named Petra, who is the principal link between them. Their relationship is full of cautiousness and topped off with a layer of bitterness that stays unaddressed. Sharon constantly needs to be reminded to take her medicine, and Petra is being teased at school and comes home with bruises. Lydia’s confident charisma confounds every aspect of her life. She is ruthless in her career, unafraid to jeopardize and betray the careers of those who work under her. And she is also unafraid to confront Petra’s bully in a bone-chilling confrontation where she introduces herself as Petra’s father. She tells the little bully in perfect German, “I will get you.” This same energy she uses in protecting her daughter she employs in attempts to protect her career when she is “canceled” on Twitter after a re-edited video goes viral of her brutal comments to a Julliard student who identifies as a “BIPOC pangender person.” Lydia can handle a school bully, but can she handle the social justice warriors of social media? Is Lydia a victim of a culture she’s unfamiliar with, or is she a threat to a new civilization of people who foster inclusivity?
As the film moves, her confidence in herself begins to become uneasy, and we question if the rising tension could be coming from a place where something terrible will happen to Lydia or if she will do something terrible. The movie’s final section is an amalgamation of everything coming to get Lydia back. Field shows her demise with a neutrality so agonizing we question our opinions. This film is ultra-modern while having a simple plot. The story develops in a world full of trendy discourse, where model conduct is no longer the goal of society. There is no question that Lydia is uber-talented, and the film queries if talent means nothing if you are an immoral individual. Lydia is “transactional” in all her relationships except with her daughter. Until her cancellation, Lydia has been in a rank that allows her to be as transactional as she pleases with the people in her life.
Todd Field doesn’t tell you how to feel about anything that occurs during the over two hour runtime of TÁR. His presence as a filmmaker is strong yet distant. We are present with Lydia in every scene of the film, everything is peripheral to her existence, and all the audience can do is sit in their seat as their anxiety bubbles up. This film feels like it was made for exactly the setting it takes place in; a world full of contemporary discussion of the ethical morals of ever-changing societal standards. This film gives no opinion on Lydia as a person; it refuses to give us, the viewers, the satisfaction of an answer.
