It took me a while, but I finally watched Todd Field’s Tár – incredibly, his first film since 2006’s Little Children. I was captivated: by its mysteries, its chilly gloom, and the bravura performance of Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, revered composer and conductor of the great Berlin Philharmonic. I’ll assume you’ve seen it – it was released over a year ago – and spare readers a plot summary in what follows. But if you haven’t seen it, there’s plenty of spoilers ahead. It’s really written for those who’ve watched it. (For more recent subscribers, here’s an early Rickenslacker piece on Bach’s Goldberg Variations.)
We meet Lydia Tár at the summit, world-famous and brilliant, but whose public and private unravelling will soon commence. For Lydia Tár has abused her considerable power, very often in the service of seducing young and impressionable students, and lies copiously and contemptuously to conceal her improprieties.
It struck me that Tár’s deceptions and denials are mostly deeply unsubtle and beneath her obvious intelligence – I can only assume that a professional lifetime of inducing fear and servility has made her complacent about her subterfuges. She doesn’t need to be careful, because she’s too powerful for accountability. Her imperiousness, rather than the sophistication of her manipulation, does the job well enough. Until it doesn’t.
My sense is that her deceptions are mostly obvious to her partner and colleagues, but that a function of her cultish personality is that everyone subject to it enters into a conspiracy of silence – to implicitly agree that they can’t see what’s obvious. And what’s obvious is that Tár is narcissistic, serially conniving and forever engineering ways to get close to younger women whose ambitions can be manipulated for sexual gratification.
Her plot to promote a young philharmonic applicant to soloist is clumsy and transparent – though precisely what her colleagues grasp is unclear. But if Tár’s partner Sharon is any guide, they all well know that their maestro doesn’t smell right. Sharon looks permanently exhausted and pained, presumably from having spent years insupportably offering her partner the benefit of doubt.
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Tár’s home, the one she shares with Sharon and their adopted daughter, is a severe manifestation of rare wealth and rarefied taste: it resembles a mausoleum in its sharp lines and polished concrete. Its owners fall into tasteful furniture, listen to Count Basie, drink glorious wine from elegant glasses. It’s impeccably, and suffocatingly, cultivated. There’s little warmth here, only lies and transactions and a self-obsession that is now finally counting its casualties.
The supreme wealth, and its distinction with other classes Tár occasionally rubs against, appear in the film – but they appear without comment, without a dogmatic hand. Class is another subject of Field’s impressive subtlety. We see the young Russian applicant taken by Tár to a prestigious restaurant, one with a clientele that stretches back to Napoleon. She’s hungry in her ambition; she’s also just hungry. She attacks the plate of food with a charming lack of self-consciousness, seemingly immune to her host’s glamorous aura – an aura Tár intends to be both seductive and intimidating. Tár would prefer her proteges to be sexually enthralled, but fear and dependency will do just as well.
There’s another brief and disturbing contrast of class, or stations. Later in the film some kind of reckoning is coming, but Tár’s also experiencing a crack-up – presumably tied to the pressure of exposure, but just how much they’re tethered we can’t say.
She seems to be experiencing auditory hallucinations – on one occasion, an unseen woman screaming in a park. And there’s another sound, repeated for weeks: two notes, like an electronic door bell. Another auditory phantom? Perhaps, until there’s a knock on the door of her other residence – a more modest flat she keeps to work in – and a distressed neighbour asks for her help. And it’s here that we learn – I think – that those notes were made by the ignored duress bell rung by an old and immobile lady grossly neglected by her mad sister. Just feet from the maestro’s door lies a world of awesome squalor.
Does Tár absorb this fact? Take its weight? Does the juxtaposition pinch her? It doesn’t seem like it. But again, her tumult of feeling remains mysterious to us – and likely to her, too. If one thing’s clear, it’s that her talent – and the world’s glorification of it – has cut her off from just about everything but her own reflection.
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One fascinating thing about this film is the spread of passionate interpretations it’s spawned. It’s testament to Field’s brave/thoughtful ambiguity in a culture with little patience for anything other than righteously defined heroes and villains. This is not an op-ed as cinema. But, still: some of the interpretations have baffled me. Not for the first time does it seem that the New Yorker’s Richard Brody has watched a different film to me. “The drama… presents her as a victim,” he writes. And: “[The film] offers a calculated measure of doubt, in order to present her accusers as unhinged and hysterical and the protesters gathered against her as frantic and goofy.” And: “The film looks at any social station and way of life besides the money-padded and the pristinely luxurious as cruddy, filthy, pathetic.”
Really? It seems clear to me that Tár’s a monster, as it seems clear to me that the man who wrote her thinks so too. A monster of self-absorption, grubby manipulations, and cruel superiority. She’s a machine of deception, for Chrissake, and for a long time it seems that little except her tortured dreams have offered any resistance to her rapacity.
Tár’s a mysterious film. Much is teased or blurred or withheld. But for this viewer, at least, there was sufficient evidence for my judgement above. Sufficient evidence that she had long manipulated young and impressionable women and, when it seemed to have contributed to one’s suicide, sufficient evidence that she creepily tried to conceal the fact.
One question the film might ask (and also be commendably uncommitted to answering) is what clemency, if any, might be granted to her on account of her talent. Lydia Tár, after all, is no grasping hack. Her great status, while vainly cultivated, is still a function of her supreme talent, commitment and wit. She’s obsessively committed; her enchantment with music total. A favourite slur of hers, repeated throughout the film, is “robot” – used to describe those too scared, insipid or talentless to forge something of their own. People whose souls are proscribed by others. “There’s no glory for robots,” she tells one of her patrons, a wealthy man and inferior conductor who’s begging for her secrets and of whom her contempt will later spectacularly express itself.
Well, for me, no clemency at all. Despite the partial ambiguity of her sins, I’m convinced of her monstrousness, even if I can appreciate her talent. It’s a curious fact of Lydia Tár that this woman who values soulful and authentic commitment above all else is, in every other realm of her life, shabbily deceptive.
And yet… I rejoiced at the early scene, much commented upon, when Tár condemns – in a monologue that begins playfully, but turns venomous – a young, self-proclaimed “BIPOC pangender” student who confesses his indifference to Bach – Bach! – on account of his alleged misogyny, evidenced by his squiring of 20 children. “Don’t be so eager to be offended,” she says. “The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity.” And: “The problem with enrolling yourself as an ultrasonic epistemic dissident is that if Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality, and so on, then so can yours.”
Some will say that here’s an op-ed straw-man jammed into the mouth of Field’s character. I could care less. The monologue is of a piece with Tár’s intellectual hauteur. Also, the philistinism she loathes here is very real. I encountered it on campus 20 years ago. It remains alive today. Here’s me from an earlier Rickenslacker piece:
I wanted to liberate my passion from their baffling sophistications. My teachers seemed to think that my love for literature was gauche, my aesthetic pleasure naive, my spiritual concerns antiquated, and my belief that the Western canon might be something other than a hegemonic fist as dumb or fascistic.
It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that the Canon wasn’t monolithic; that it variously ignored, refuted or revised its parts. It didn’t seem to matter that it was raucous and spoke of humbling universalities of existence. Now, sure, the Canon shouldn’t oblige fealty – nor be excused of its racial and gendered exclusiveness – but to be fundamentally dismissive of it seemed dull and self-defeating.
Regardless, all letters were power they said, and Dead White Men were to be prosecuted for exercising it. In their litigious fury, aesthetic genius could be dismissed as a cheap illusion of power, and a young man reading Dickens dismissed as a patriarchal dupe.
Many critics of the film have pounced upon this scene, or monologue, as proof of its director’s real intention. That Tár’s words are his, and that the whole film – all two hours and 37 minutes – are to be interpreted through it. I find this achingly stupid, so much so that it pains me to prosecute. If Todd Field wanted to write an op-ed about the ultra-sensitivity and philistinism of woke youth, he could have – and not spent many years on a film, his first in almost two decades, in which what follows after that scene is a patient, partial and thoughtfully ambiguous undermining of it.
In other words, if Todd Field has very explicit, passionate and simple ideas he wants to ventilate about contemporary culture, then he’s gone about expressing them in a bloody strange way.
For me, the film is less about #MeToo and “cancel culture” and much more about the derangements of celebrity, the costs and glory of obsession, and the dubious machinery which supports charismatic leadership. It is also, of course, about the abuse of power. In Lydia Tár, we have a serial abuser – someone who comes to feel entitled to their games and predations, and who can’t help but corrupt those in her service.
For all of the film’s ambiguity, hallucinatory passages and Relevant Discourse, we have at heart a very old story: of a mighty Queen unravelled by decadence and dim self-knowledge who’s eventually felled by her suffering subjects. We end the film with her exile, and are left to wonder what capacity, if any, she has left for soulful restoration.