Power is genderless. If you touch it, it’s going to contaminate you
RACHAEL DAVIS TALKS TO STAR CATE BLANCHETT AND WRITER AND DIRECTOR TODD FIELD ABOUT THEIR AWARD-WINNING MOVIE, TAR, A MESMERISING CHARACTER STUDY THAT’S TIPPED FOR OSCAR SUCCESS
THERE aren’t many actors who could open a film with a scene depicting a full interview with a New Yorker journalist and it be an utterly engrossing introduction to a character, but the inimitable Cate Blanchett pulls it off.
Playing the titular role in Todd Field’s Tar, a character study exploring the reputational downfall of a fictitious enigmatic first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, Cate is omnipresent throughout the film. She is in almost every shot, never mind every scene.
“I’ve never encountered a character as elusive and as complex as Lydia Tar,” says the 53-year-old star, describing how she embodied the character.
“I’m very language focused, and, of course, the first quarter of the film is very top heavy with language, but then that sort of peters out into silence.”
Cate has already picked up a Golden Globe for best actress in a drama, and a Critics Choice Award for best actress at the weekend for her work on Tar and the movie is tipped to be a serious contender at the Oscars in March.
She says: “In a way, I started with what she loved. I started with the music, I started with this thing that had kept her alive and kept her sane, and that she was risking losing because of the events that unfold in the film.
“But she’s incredibly complex. I think she’s very hidden from herself. And that quality, that aspect of her being ambushed by things that she had buried deep in her past, I think was made possible and accessible for an audience because of Todd’s filmmaking. He was very much [a] fly on the wall. “The filmmaking, I think, helped to emphasise how deep the audience could get inside her psychology.” In keeping Tar such a ubiquitous figure in the film by making Cate’s performance the focal point of the entire narrative, writer and director Todd Field makes it abundantly clear how influential and powerful the character is.
see her behind the podium, commanding her players; in meetings where she is deftly holding her own among her white, male musical contemporaries; at home with her adopted daughter Petra, where she stands up to playground bullies with biting words that are enough to threaten an adult into servitude; and crucially with her young, attractive female players and assistants who clearly hold more than a professional admiration for the conductor.
“There were very simple rules for the film,” says Todd when asked why he wanted to make Tar such an intense character study. “Trying to understand why is this happening – this character got into whatever she did, like all of us, because she had a great love for something, she had a love for music, it was going to transform her and change her. And it did.
“And now she’s sitting atop this power structure.
“There’s the artist in her and then there’s the other part of her that has to deal with a lot of other things, maybe she’s not so wellequipped to deal with.
“We must never leave her. Because if we don’t leave her then, at least during that three-week period of time [in the film], we can really see what she’s going through. “But it also allows us, potentially, to try to fill in the history from before and make our own decisions as an audience and be able to be judge and jury over her.
“If we left her, you kind of break the spell of that.”
Despite conducting being a “hierarchical, white male-dominated canon”, as Cate describes it, the fictional Tar has ascended the industry’s ranks.
She has worked in all of the ‘Big Five’ American orchestras while developing her own compositions, and earned her spot on the coveted and short list of so-called EGOTs – those who have won all four major awards of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.
Now at the height of her career, she holds the prestigious position of chief conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, and is preparing for both a book launch and a much-anticipated live performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
She also runs a mentoring scholWe arship programme for women – rumoured to be a source of young women with whom she has affairs – and attempts to maintain her domestic life with her partner Sharon, played by Nina Hoss, and their daughter Petra, that is until dark secrets come to light and threaten to make Lydia’s house of cards come tumbling down.
“It is a fairy tale, in a way,” says Cate. “Even though there are some extraordinary female conductors, there always have been, they just haven’t been provided the opportunity. “As a woman stepping up onto the podium, 70% of their energy is having to push the politics of that step up outside, so they’re considered to be the extraordinary musicians that they are. “But the film’s not about that,” adds the star.
“The fact that they’re in a samesex relationship, the fact that they’re women in a very hierarchical, white male dominated canon. It’s a texture to the film, but it’s not the narrative.”
Instead, Todd is more interested in the dynamics of power – how it corrupts and how it is facilitated by others. The reverence those around Tar have for her becomes, as we discover, rather insidious for the maesthat tro, as we watch her life unravel in a distinctly modern way as those wrapped up in her autocracy begin to stand up against it.
“The main idea is that we wanted to build this sort of thing where you could walk around and really examine: How does power work? Who benefits? Who doesn’t? How omnidirectional it is, and how complicit it is,” says the Oscar-nominated director, 58, who also helmed 2006’s Little Children and 2001’s In the Bedroom.
“Everybody is complicit with her. She’s not sitting up there alone, she’s there because she’s allowed, because there’s a benefit to other people. “But I think that we see so much, and we have seen so much historically, and it’s always patriarchal. “There’s a very good reason for that – men have held power. I think we all have a very quick and efficient reaction when we hear about men who abuse their positions of power.
“So it was important that this character not be a man, because it afforded, hopefully, an opportunity to actually look at how power actually corrupts individuals. That it’s genderless. It’s a phenomenon – if you touch it, it’s going to contaminate you.”
If we don’t leave her... we can really see what she’s going through Director Todd Field
A 33-year-old woman stares death in the face and takes control of her destiny in a thought-provoking drama directed by Emily Atef and co-written by Lars Hubrich and Atef.
Helene (Vicky Krieps) and husband Mathieu (Gaspard Ulliel) are happily settled in Bordeaux when a shocking medical diagnosis turns their lives upside down.
Faced with an incurable and rare lung condition, Helene seeks comfort in the online blog of a terminally ill Norwegian man known as Mister (Bjorn Floberg).
Inspired by his humour in the face of adversity she visits Scandinavia in the hope of finding peace against the backdrop of mountains and fjords.
Mathieu gives chase, determined to bring Helene back safely to Bordeaux where he can take care of her, supported by friends.
In cinemas Friday
FOR many of us, the cinema is more than simply a place to go and watch a film. It’s a pathway to another world, a refuge from life’s troubles, a community in and of itself.
Empire Of Light, the new film from 1917 and Skyfall director Sam Mendes and the first he’s penned by himself, is a love letter to that experience, as well as a story of mental health, racism, and of love in the face of adversity.
Set in the early 1980s in the Kent seaside town of Margate, it follows Olivia Colman’s Hilary, the duty manager of the fictional Empire cinema on the seafront, who is living with an undefined mental illness that sees her experience manic episodes and periods of low mood. Hilary lives alone, and struggles to find meaningful relationships in her life – she has a malignant relationship with married cinema manager Mr Ellis, described by actor Colin Firth as a “predator”, and subdued scenes of her eating Christmas dinner alone suggest she has no family or friends to support her. That is except for her chosen family at the Empire, an eclectic mix of misfits who find kinship in the cinema.
There’s Norman the projectionist, played by Toby Jones; junior manager Neil, played by The Boat That Rocked’s Tom Brooke; music-loving teenager Ruby, played by This Is Going To Hurt’s Hannah Onslow; and newcomer Stephen, a young black man trying to find his place in the world played by Top Boy’s Micheal Ward, who sparks a romantic connection with Hilary.
“It is about the destination that is a cinema, a sort of palace of dreams, you like,” says director Sam, 57. “When I grew up, it was the only way you could see a movie, so the experience of going to the movies was a thing in itself.
“And it’s also about the kind of ad hoc, weird, but beautiful families that you find in these places, and that I found as an only child who didn’t really grow up with a family, that I discovered in the theatre and film: these eccentric families, these people who somehow support you, and treat you with love and lack of judgment.”
Olivia’s portrayal of Hilary’s mental illness, its ebbs, flows, manic highs and numbing lows, is sensitive, and masterful.
Subtle changes – a glint in an eye, a smudge of lipstick on teeth, a gaze into the middle distance – show fluctuations in Hilary’s mental state, but Olivia’s performance never feels contrived or exaggerated.
“The approach of it... it’s all on the page. And I
have to defer to Sam – he wrote it from experiences that he had,” explains Olivia, 48.
“So, every step of the way, I had the best research material, you know: ‘Sam, what was it like, and what was that like?’ Because Hilary is loosely based on Sam’s mum.” “I think that mental illness... still there’s this sort of weird stigma about talking about it,” adds Sam. “And it’s very difficult to describe, you know, and if you could describe it, perhaps there would be no reason to make a movie about it.
“But [it’s] dramatising it and showing it, how complex it is, and how many different layers there are to it and what the difference [is] between medicating and no medication. And the fact that, you know, if you were to come out of a hospital having recovered from say, cancer, everybody would ask you how you were. But when you come out of a mental health facilif ity, nobody asks you anything. And that is the big difference, there are very few ways to talk about it that don’t feel awkward for the person who suffers.”
At the start of the film, we see Hilary at the doctor’s discussing her prescription for lithium, a mood stabiliser which she says is making her feel slightly numb.
“She doesn’t really feel anything very strongly,” says Olivia.
“She’s going through the motions at work, going through the motions with Mr Ellis. She lives alone, doesn’t speak to anyone – it’s a lonely existence, and she wants more. She wants to feel more.” Serendipitously, in walks Stephen, who’s just been hired at the cinema and immediately sparks a connection with Hilary. “She’s dazzled by him,” says Olivia. “She transforms from feeling nothing to feeling tingles. She comes off her medication and then goes through phases to a point where she’s heroic in her mania. I loved playing Hilary because of the different emotional states that we find her in.” “What I loved about playing Stephen was that he has this complex relationship with this older woman, because I’ve never really seen it on screen before,” adds 25-year-old Michael.
“And I feel like there are not many people that are going to address something like that, which also
needed to be addressed, I think, because it shows that it’s not really about age or colour in this instance. “It’s just about how two people connect over things that they love. And I think that’s so important.”
“1981, in the UK, had a very particular socio-political environment,” explains Motherland’s Tanya Moodie, 50, who plays Stephen’s mother.
“We had the National Front and we had the Rivers of Blood speech, we had the Brixton riots, we had the New Cross fires.”
Nevertheless, Michael says of his character Stephen, “he’s a young black man, excited by the opportunities in life; he loves people, loves to connect with music and movies, and he refuses to allow an oppressive society to define who he is”.
“In the middle of lockdown there was a racial reckoning in the world,” adds Sam.
“We were left alone to contemplate how our own racial politics had been formed, and whether we had fallen down in our attempts to make sure the world was evolving.
“When I wrote the movie there was also another common obsession: we were all worried whether the cinema was going to die, along with live performances.
“So, all of those things have gone into this movie, and in that regard, it’s quite raw.”
When I grew up, it was the only way you could see a movie, so the experience of going to the movies was a thing in itself. Sam Mendes