Tár

The psychodrama about a conductor facing abuse allegations and her own mental unravelling just picked up six Academy Award nominations, yet hardly anyone ...

[Keva York wrote:](/news/2023-01-24/tar-review-cate-blanchett-todd-field-cancel-culture/101873890) "Although I would argue that Tár is not a polemic but a psychodrama, it's nevertheless true that the film is wilfully enigmatic." [2021 documentary The Conductor](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/movies/the-conductor-review.html), is name-checked early in Tár and, as [Zachary Woolfe points out in The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/arts/music/tar-female-conductors-power.html), shares many biographical details with fictional Lydia Tár. When it opened in the US in October, [parody social media accounts](https://twitter.com/LydiaTarReal) began to crop up as well as [theories about the film's final act](https://slate.com/culture/2022/12/tar-cate-blanchett-movie-ending-explained-analyzed.html). And when is it no longer a benefit?" So we're able to lean into the complexity of the question." Baard said: "Unlike a big superhero movie or a star-studded romantic comedy, Tár is a film that requires more [commitment and understanding from the average audience]. [ Attitude, saying](https://www.attitude.co.uk/culture/cate-blanchett-on-tar-gaytoo-and-her-lesbian-icon-status-ill-take-it-422529/): "Yeah, baby! If she manages to beat out other Oscars frontrunner Michelle Yeoh (who won the Golden Globe for lead actress in a movie comedy for That includes Tár, which is being released in Australia in sync with the Oscar nominations. She's also barely able to hide her interest in a young cellist (newcomer Sophie Kauer). She describes playing a conductor as "exhilarating and addictive … But power is a very compelling and corruptive force," says Blanchett.

Sophie Kauer on how film and fame won't get in the way of practicing.

Again, gratitude emerges as the overriding emotion: ‘The film pushed me to develop my performing mindset - I don’t think I would have sorted it out that quickly and I think I might have felt a bit stuck if I spent my whole bachelors in a practice room. For the immediate future, she was thrilled that her parents and sister were able to attend the premiere. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by the emotional life of people and had a love of languages - It’s healthy to think of yourself as more than a musician.’ Olga is far from the cellist I know in Kauer, demonstrating her incredible ability to enter into a character’s psyche and not only act, but play the cello in a different mind, shown in the film’s live recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto. ‘I want to show people that musicians’ voices are valid, but part of my being able to do that is I have had to start setting clear boundaries. ‘I really like that they wanted to make the album a snapshot into what it’s like to record, because people often don’t know how it works. Kauer’s contribution to the album includes the fourth movement from Elgar’s Cello Concerto, alongside a section from the first movement and some additional conversations from the recording session. Where is the cello sitting now in spite of such success in acting? Our lives overlapped through learning cello with Melissa Phelps and thinking back to that time, I’ll never forget Kauer aged 15, being so sincere, kind and dedicated to the cello - never failing to tap into the strength and potential of its sound. Kauer shares the excitement with open arms: ‘Do you want to see the dress?’ She opens her phone to show me the Giles Deacon stunning ‘Cynge Gown’ of white cotton with a tulle skirt that she’ll wear on the red carpet. Todd also took me through the backstory, helping me to understand what my character was feeling and why he wrote her the way he did.’ Her white cello case is on the floor next to us, but she decides to prop it up in sight instead.

Conductor Natalie Murray Beale talks to Limelight about teaching Cate Blanchett to wield the baton in TÁR and the film's potential to provoke.

I immediately think of regions, cities or towns where there isn’t a concert hall, or a practising orchestra, and so the possibility of seeing a conductor live is impossible. It’s easy to recognise that playing an instrument or conducting is a very specific skill and in TÁR the camera takes you up close to the performers. The joy I find in working with actors is their incredible skills of listening and reacting, being free with their bodies, spatial awareness, an openness to trying new things. He engaged a real orchestra, the wonderful Dresdner Philharmonie, who play and act in the film. Australian audiences are just about to see TÁR in the cinemas (from 26 January) and there’s a great deal of interest in it, particularly in the music sector. There’s also an immersive quality, you may feel like you are a fly on the wall, observing the action, which brings you very close to the characters and draws you into the music making.

Cate Blanchett's fierce composer is a proxy for all the rage I'm not allowed, as a middle-aged woman, to express.

In the scene when Tár storms the stage to wrest her precious annotated score from the man who has stolen it – a violent scene that is none the less powerful for being (perhaps) a fantasy – I felt a fierce combination of rage and satisfaction course through my body. I gaped enviously at her white shirts and her bespoke suits; the poured concrete of her apartment; the pad across town kept, it is implied, for extra-marital sex; the workaholic tendencies; the naked pride in her talent. Cate Blanchett is the same age as me, and there she was, filling up the screen: taking her place, the opposite of invisible. I understand that she might be; that it’s possible to see her as a fiend. [social media](https://www.newstatesman.com/tag/social-media), men insist Todd Field’s award-winning film – about the fall of a renowned composer and conductor, Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett – is just so much pretentious, culture war dross; in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith’s awestruck scene-by-scene anatomisation runs to thousands of words and comes with footnotes. I can’t remember the last time a movie divided opinion as Tár has.

Historic Papple Steading has brought a touch of Hollywood to Haddington, East Lothian, after being taken over by Todd Field to work on Oscar-tipped Tár.

“There’s some provenance in the building and it allows us to begin to tell the story of the laird and the ploughman. That was quite nice for the team, it was a privilege.” She loved the place as well, and thought it was a great post-production place.” The bonus is that Todd and the team liked it so much.” “There had been a throwaway comment about finding a place in the middle of nowhere in Scotland,” he explained. It wasn’t the film’s lead actor, but a star with a very similar name.

It's an, at-times, icy black comedy and a tragic character study melded within the cancel culture mentality and the #MeToo movement. It asks questions and poses ...

Field’s script doesn’t delve too deep into the allegations that follow Tár, with only something of a throwaway suggestion that she “enticed and groomed young women” as our in to this certain narrative strand. In a post-#MeToo landscape, Tár is intelligent enough to not present this storyline as a type-of pat-on-the-back, self-congratulatory additive, but address the very experienced reality that women in power can be just as corrupt and as predatory as the predominant men that such accusations have often followed. It asks questions and poses theories it doesn’t want to finely answer, and whatever it asks with something of certainty – that of “if we’re able to separate the art from the artist?” – it secures that the answer is an impossible demand to even comprehend.

Todd Field wrote and directed Tar with Cate Blanchett in mind for the lead. It tells a tale of misconduct, manipulation, and a power-hungry conductor who ...

The field doesn’t let up for a second, down to the film’s credits, which open with all those who work behind the scenes at the bottom of the movie ‘food chain’ and end with the actors and musicians who usually bask in all the glory. Where visuals offer no moments of warmth or catharsis, the sound design in the film is also impeccable. The most impressive element of the film is Cate Blanchett’s performance. The– entirely fictional– Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is widely regarded to be one of the most successful living composers/conductors of her time and a trailblazer for female conductors. The film is two hours and forty minutes of stunning visuals, gut-clenching tension and scintillating performances. Tár (2022) is set in the intriguing international world of Westen classical music.

Tár is covered in Oscar nominations, and it's clear to see from how Todd Gothic creates a Gothic horror movie about cancel culture.

As she works in her apartment, there is constant knocking at her door, and she is haunted by the sounds of distant chimes ringing in her ear. At one point, in a public park, she is disoriented by the sounds of distant sirens and a woman screaming. She wakes up in the middle of the night to find a metronome ticking in her office, keeping time; she snaps the pendulum off it. Tár is a conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic. At one point, after suggesting something “a little less considered” to the photographer (Artjom Gilz) working on her album art, the film cuts to an even more staged photo of her thoughtfully reviewing and notating her portfolio in the concert hall. “Time is the essential piece of interpretation. Late in the movie, it is revealed that Lydia Tár is herself a fiction. “Time is the thing,” she boasts. It is the tale of somebody with a guilty conscience, desperately hoping that the past won’t catch up to them. Tár is ambiguous about the precise nature of the relationship. She is introduced as a student of the real-life composer Leonard Bernstein, whom she affectionately refers to as “Lenny.” She appears on Here’s the Thing, with Alec Baldwin playing himself. Much of the discussion of Tár has focused on its engagement with the idea of “cancel culture.” Around an hour into the film, it is revealed that one of Tár’s former students, Krista Taylor (Sylvia Flote), has taken her own life.