How an actress got the role of a lifetime
Director Todd Field wrote Tár after meeting ‘true genius’ Cate Blanchett
Myself and many others think it’s the best performance of a long career full of Oscars
ERIK ANDERSON, AWARDSWATCH
Cate Blanchett has seen the headlines. “Tár takes on the devastating spectacle of ‘cancellation’,” reads The Atlantic’s review of her new film, while The Telegraph calls it the “the first cancel-culture thriller”.
Written and directed by Todd Field (In the Bedroom), the chilling drama traces the gradual downfall of a world-famous classical music conductor named Lydia Tár (Blanchett) amid sexual misconduct allegations. But the film can’t be boiled down to a single hot-button issue, the actress says.
“This has been the hardest film for me to reduce to some digestible sound bite,” Blanchett says in a New York hotel suite with co-star Nina Hoss. “It’s an examination of the corruptive nature of power in all its forms, but it’s also about so many other things,” both psychological and existential.
“It’s rare to see a film that has genuinely big questions. And it respects the audience enough to ask them.”
Tár begins with Lydia at a career pinnacle: conducting a Berlin orchestra and teaching classes at Juilliard as she’s set to release her memoir. But personally, she is spiralling: she’s hit a creative roadblock trying to compose her next masterpiece, and her bullied young daughter (Mila Bogojevic) is struggling at school.
Meanwhile, tensions simmer with her violinist wife, Sharon (Hoss), after Lydia’s former student commits suicide – leaving behind a potentially damning paper trail about an improper relationship.
Despite the film’s timely premise, Lydia is a fictional character who “I’d been thinking about for quite a while”, Field says. He wrote the character specifically for Blanchett, after meeting the actress years ago and discussing the possibility of collaborating.
“That meeting left an impression I couldn’t shake, as if someone had permanently scalded me with a branding iron,” Field recalls. “A true genius. So, who better to play a genius?”
Blanchett, 53, says she hadn’t read anything like Tár before. She was compelled by its themes of legacy and the “tragic nature” of time, as Lydia faces turning 50 and wonders what’s left – if anything – for her to still accomplish.
“I had a seismic response to it that I still don’t quite understand,” Blanchett says. “It spoke to a lot of things I had been thinking about for a long time: not only in relation to power structures, but also for me personally, the creative process.
“When you get to a certain point in your career and you’ve done a few things – some of them have worked, some of them haven’t – at what point do you risk throwing it all away? Is that the bravest thing you could do?”
She was also drawn to how the film “doesn’t allow the audience to sit in easy judgment of the characters”. Lydia brutally castigates students whose tastes she deems too “woke”. She has no qualms about promoting a pretty young cellist (Sophie Kauer) over a more experienced one, or hacking her assistant’s (Noémie Merlant) laptop to erase incriminating emails.
“It’s very rare that women get portrayed like that,” Hoss says. “If female characters are powerful, or they’re slightly more complicated than normal, you usually get an explanation why that happened: a motivation or a trauma from childhood. That does not necessarily happen if you’re male.”
The character’s prickly demeanour hasn’t tempered critics’ enthusiasm for the film.
“Myself and many others think it’s the best performance of a long career full of Oscars and stellar roles,” says Erik Anderson, founder of Oscar prediction site AwardsWatch. “Her utter dominance in Tár – she’s in every single scene – is overwhelming compared to any other contender.”
Last month, Blanchett received the Volpi Cup for best actress at Venice Film Festival for Tár. Her daughter, Edith, 7, and mother, June, were both on hand to watch her accept the prize.
Blanchett says: “[The Volpi Cup] is such an honour, of course, but everyone seems to talk about performances as if they exist without an ensemble. People go and see Hamlet, but they don’t really feel the play unless there’s an incredible Gertrude.”
“That’s very kind,” Hoss says. “But take the compliment. Take the compliment!”
Together, Blanchett and Hoss embarked on a “crash course in absolutely everything to do with classical music”. The German actress trained in violin, while Blanchett learned how to conduct and play piano. She also learned German, although Hoss insists that she didn’t give her co-star any pointers on her native language.
“I didn’t need to,” Hoss says. “She was perfect.”