Cate Blanchett is deep-souled Lydia, the classical orchestra conductor in Tár
Tár (2022)
At first it seems that Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the formidably talented classical music conductor at the center of this dire tale of comeuppance, has it all. Not only is she at the top of the classical music pyramid, as conductor of the uber-prestigious Berlin Philharmonic, she dominates the orchestra’s personnel like a cat encircling mice.
She doesn’t remotely pretend to be “collegial”. Standing at the podium, her baton lifted, Lydia radiates upward, soul-to-soul, with the great composers whose music she celebrates. She’s especially entranced by Mahler (whose work is thrillingly performed here).
In writer-director Todd Field’s Tár we’re meant to be both awed by and gravely suspicious of this dynamo in flowing hair. Her undoing, though, happens precipitously and not altogether convincingly.
Lydia’s behavior here seems to me, without any special knowledge of the workings of a classical orchestra, an unlikely example of how a conductor rehearses and performs. Raging egos and exasperating eccentrics can certainly be found in the world of classical music. But with Lydia, we get the special case of the “genius” who’s also a sexual predator.
First, of course, we must be awed. In the movie’s opening, we see Lydia being interviewed by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (playing himself) as she deftly parries his probes into her few “insecurities”, which she makes clear aren’t liabilities.
She slays on the podium, too. We watch Lydia criticize, outtalk, interrupt, goad and chasten the musicians under her baton. She constantly wants more from them.
Give me, she demands, the music inside the music. But without her prompting, she laments, they don’t stand a chance of even hearing it. The one thing their years of practice and performing haven’t prepared them for is her unique insights, her mind-expanding intuitions.
I think Lydia’s bombastic lecturing would strike any seasoned musician as perhaps marginally helpful but mostly condescending. If you’re a musical leader you can inspire without taunting and belittling your players, whose combined decades of experience are all you’ve got to bring your “vision” to life.
There are other ways to enlighten. Though he surely wasn’t the first to do it, Miles Davis famously chided his bandmates when, in a recording studio or on a nightclub stand, they got stuck in a lifeless groove: You’re playing the notes. Play the music.
Lydia is telling her musicians: You’re playing like robots. Peer into my soul and come alive.
In other words, Miles re-directed his musicians’ energy, urging them to be more attentive listeners. Lydia storms their psyches to bend them to her will, to justify her desires.
Is Lydia’s haranguing a bit much? I think so. Field’s sleek, “tasteful” filming enfolds her in a cold glow. Too often all his actors seem to squirm under a microscope. As a result, their work doesn’t feel entirely willed or lived in, and fails to convey much pain viewed through all the glossy art.
Unquestionably, Field shoots with trim, tight elegance. His compositions, for all their icy proficiency, are painterly, detailed, foxily absorbing.
But it’s not just the camera that keeps us spellbound without feeling much. We sense from the beginning that Field’s writing is undermining Lydia even as it seems to exalt her, that a long overdue, richly deserved takedown is heading straight for her.
Despite Lydia’s triumphs, she’s been careless. Classical musicians worldwide are whispering about her seducing and cruelly disillusioning female members of orchestras she’s led. Krista, an aspiring conductor among the Berlin Philharmonic’s players, has informed the orchestra’s board that Lydia made extravagant promises to her of advancement, then snatched them away.
Krista’s story is recounted in the New York Post, along with accusations of Lydia “grooming” other female musicians. Lydia laughingly tells the orchestra board that it was Krista who was inappropriately emotional, idealizing Lydia and sending her unwanted emails and gifts.
And the Post’s reporting of other young women’s complaints, Lydia sneers, is “fiction”. Still, Lydia’s intricate pattern of deceptions begins to crumble.
A swept-up Lydia takes full, mesmerizing command at the orchestra podium in Tár
Watching Lydia conduct, we understand we’re meant to sense in her the consummate interpreter’s power. Yet the monomaniacal energy Blanchett pumps through this woman takes no account of the ticket holders in the concert hall (i.e., people like us). Lydia barely mentions them.
We’ve read of the downfalls of manipulative, cruel men in show business and the arts, from Weinstein to Spacey to Cosby, from James Levine at the New York Metropolitan Opera (mentioned in this script) to Peter Martins at New York City Ballet.
For some reason Field, 16 years after his most recent movie, has decided it’s time to put the screws to a female sacred monster.
I’ve seen Blanchett as a rich suburban bi-sexual seductress in Carol (2015), with its happy ending, and a scheming married teacher who only seems to fall prey to the wiles of an older female teacher (Judi Dench) in Notes on a Scandal (2006).
These two roles could be taken as preparation for Lydia, who’s in what at first seems to be a loyal, affectionate, if not exactly ardent, relationship with Sharon (Nina Hoss). They have a young daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic), who also isn’t spared Lydia’s ghoulish attention.
Seeing Lydia stride onto a school ground and threaten a child who’s been physically abusing Petra is one of the movie’s most unsettling moments. This woman plays for keeps even with children.
At the same time, what a deluxe lifestyle Lydia maintains for herself, Sharon and Petra in a large, lavish Berlin apartment, with a luxury car for both women to drive Petra to school. Sharon is a key player in the Berlin Phil, a skilled violinist and concertmaster to Lydia’s maestra (we often hear that final “a” discreetly, shakily enunciated, like a talisman her underlings nervously award Lydia).
Blanchett is indefatigably hard-working here. She’s nuanced and frighteningly specific in her every gesture, tic and malevolent smile.
Demonstrably, though, Blanchett’s power can be employed over and above her excellence, as it is here. Her Lydia is an object lesson more than a character. She’s a preaching device to warn us about predatory women who can be as cruel and destructive and predatory as men.
But are they as prevalent or easy to spot as loopy, obsessed Lydia? Lydia is hyper-aggressive and megalomaniacal from the moment we meet her, and has gone on like this, unpunished, for years. Why haven’t more professional musicians eased her out of their way?
Field means her to come across as an alluring ensnarer, but is anyone in the audience for this movie, in 2022, deceived or taken in by Lydia? I rather doubt it. Field is steering us toward a threat that may not be so prevalent.
Tár is more diversion than revelation. It tries to scare us about a woman we’re actually quite unlikely to be fooled by. And it doesn't call on us to be on the lookout for men who are still in seats of power nearly everywhere. The movie business decidedly included.