What ‘TÁR’ says about power, music, and maestro culture
And what it could have said, but didn’t
Lydia Tár is not real. A fictional character at the center of the new film “TÁR,” she’s a globally revered orchestral conductor imagined by director Todd Field and brought to life by Cate Blanchett.
But the details that make up her world are very real: the namedropping, the backroom deals, the blind auditions that can never be truly blind, the way orchestral musicians always say “Beethoven 5” or “Brahms 4” when talking with one another about symphonies, never “Beethoven’s 5th Symphony” or heaven forbid “Symphony Number 5.” One of the only truly unbelievable things in the first two hours is an anecdote about how she did a mid-career stint with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I interpreted that as a reference to her having been music director.
The BSO has never had a female music director.
The movie’s first scene features The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, as himself, interviewing Lydia Tár. She’s an EGOT (winner of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony), a former mentee of Leonard Bernstein, the founder of a fellowship program for young female conductors. She’s on the verge of both a book launch and a live recording of Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 5 with the Berlin Philharmonic, where she’s head conductor. (Yet another orchestra that has never had a woman at the helm.) Her interactions are dense with references to real past and present inhabitants of the classical music world: for instance, glass ceiling-shattering conductor Marin Alsop. Only a small slice of the audience will understand some scenes, and I’m not just talking about the rehearsals in unsubtitled German.
More important than what she says is how she says it. “You cannot start without me. I start the clock,” she says in reference to conducting during the Gopnik interview. “Sometimes my second hand stops, which means time stops.”
When we first meet Lydia, she is as much of a star as the present-day classical world allows, wearing the public’s acclaim as easily as she does her bespoke pantsuits. Everyone around her revolves in a fixed orbit. There’s her long-term romantic relationship with the brittle and resilient Berlin Philharmonic concertmaster Sharon (Nina Hoss), with whom she is raising an adopted daughter. Then there’s her protégé, personal assistant, and emotional dumpster Francesca (Noémie Merlant), herself an aspiring conductor who spends every waking moment tending to Lydia’s needs. Representing the old guard, there’s Lydia’s own mentor and predecessor, Andris Davis (Julian Glover). And then there’s the bubbly, attractive young Russian gunning for a permanent spot in the cello section (Sophie Kauer, making an astounding feature film debut and performing all her own solos). Blanchett herself learned to speak German, conduct, and play piano for the central role. She is magnificent, impossible to look away from — and you don’t have to, because she is only ever offscreen for a few seconds out of almost three hours.
Lydia is only ever comfortable when she’s in control — of a conversation, her environment, her future, even time itself. “You must subsume yourself . . . obliterate yourself in front of the public and God,” she exhorts a class of Juilliard students. When a self-described “BIPOC pangender” student expresses a distaste for Bach, she calls the class a bunch of “millennial robots”; with that subtle, sharp detail, we see she’s out of touch with the world at large. The film is set in the present day, post-COVID lockdown.
Those students look too young to be anything but Gen Z.
The film’s conflicts arise and escalate when she is confronted by circumstances that she cannot bend to her will, and Lydia’s star gradually collapses into a black hole. The intrusions begin with sound: a neighbor knocking at the door, a rattling car vent. Nature and machine conspire to haunt Lydia as she dodges reminders of a past that she’d rather stay buried. We learn she had an inappropriate intimate relationship with Krista (Sylvia Flote), a young woman who was a fellow of the program she founded. Then the conductor blacklisted her, emailing contacts at orchestras the world over to make sure she never gets a job and writing her off with “she had issues.”
In the real world as well, the power handed to certain people based on artistic ability or professional status has contributed to a code of silence. Several influential figures in the classical world have been accused of sexual assault or harassment, and their accusers have said they feared career consequences should they go against the wishes of their alleged abusers, or officially report their misbehavior.
Unlike them, Lydia is a woman. However, the issue in the film is not gender, but power. Placing a charismatic and tyrannical queer woman character at the center of the film allows for nuanced conversations about power, fame, sexism, and how marginalized people can acutely wound one another. Lydia presents herself as guardian, lover, mentor, “U-Haul lesbian,” villain, or whoever she must be to get others to do what she wants, without regard for anyone who gets hurt along the way. “Solidarity” might as well be a four-letter word.
With the exception of Krista, the film never confirms what Lydia’s professional misdeeds were. But do we really need to know? I’d argue not revealing the lurid details was a smart storytelling move, because it deprives the audience of the opportunity to pass judgement on whether Lydia deserves what she gets. It’s clear she abused power, and when directly confronted about the allegations against her, she lies and gets caught. All it took to knock her down was for enough people to deviate from the score.
She returns to her suburban childhood bedroom, drapes a sports medal around her neck, and tearfully watches a tape of her former mentor Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. Her brother arrives and calls her by her decidedly less Euro-chic birth name, Linda. Lydia has always known where she is going, but now she is adrift, effectively homeless. She has been convinced she’d never do anything again but be the maestro, and no one around her ever suggested she would have to. The wood-paneled walls seem to close in. The film should have ended there.
I tried to figure out how to write about my issues with the ending while including minimal spoilers, but one of my problems with the ending is its vagueness, so I feeI I must be explicit where the film refused to be. In the film’s coda, Lydia takes a conducting job in an unnamed Southeast Asian country. She is out of her element, and without the sense of place and attention to detail that characterizes the scenes in America and Europe, so is the audience. In its first two hours, the film sidestepped every pitfall concerning stereotypes about gender and queerness, but then it nosedives into some of the laziest tropes about Southeast Asia. As I watched Lydia ask a local man for somewhere to get a massage, I gritted my teeth and was disappointed when I correctly guessed the man would refer her to a spa staffed by sex workers.
All of this amounts to the sense that every frame of the film is hers, and even in the moments of her greatest humiliation, she still controls what we see and hear. We never learn what happens to any supporting characters after they’re out of the picture: how they may have been complicit in her reign, the doubts they may have had, how they react to her collapse. In the film’s last shots, she mounts the podium with her new orchestra (played by the Siam Sinfonietta), and a stage manager hands her a headset while projection screens descend from the ceiling. The house is packed with attentive young people wearing elaborate cosplay. Her new job involves (horror of horrors) leading concerts of video-game music.
As I exited the theater, I realized Lydia might have been conducting to a click track, a metronome to synchronize a live orchestra with preexisting visuals. That would mean she no longer starts and stops the clock, nor has any control over time. That would also make that shot a clever call back to her opening speech. The problem is that it’s too clever. The audience doesn’t hear the click track, so the punchline seems to be that she’s conducting game music to costumed teens in Southeast Asia. That’s a dream job for some, though many of her old-guard admirers might consider it an extreme punishment.
Still, her whiteness gives her power, while those around her are reduced to props. No matter where she goes, Lydia Tár will never be subsumed.