MASTERFULLY CONDUCTED
CATE BLANCHETT DESERVES AN OVATION FOR HER PERFORMANCE IN ‘TÁR,’ A DIZZYING AND DAZZLING FILM ABOUT AN ELITE MAESTRO AND HER FALL FROM GRACE
Behold Lydia Tár: lithe and silkily glamorous as a Saluki, an intricately coiled helix of genius, nervous tics, elegant taste and steely nerve. Watching Cate Blanchett inhabit the most indelible character to materialize on screen this year is to witness a fascinating feat of artistic doubling, wherein Blanchett brings her angular physicality and a quick, slashing intelligence to bear on a woman who’s creating herself in real time. “Tár” is less a movie than a seductive deep dive into the unraveling psyche of a woman who’s simultaneously defined by and apart from the world she has so confidently by the tail.
That world, in Lydia’s case, is classical music, a rarefied universe of transcendence and transaction that comes to hushed, high-stakes life in the hands of writer-director Todd Field. We meet Lydia, a renowned composer-conductor who has just written her memoir, while she’s being interviewed at the New Yorker festival by the magazine’s culture writer Adam Gopnik. In an almost surreally long, real-time sequence, Gopnik (playing himself ) tosses out learned questions that Lydia parries with casual brilliance, dissecting art, time, gendered language and the correct interpretation of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with erudite, offhand brio. With that single scene, Field conveys volumes of information about his protagonist, but also his bona fides as a first-class world builder: This is an environment he understands down to the last meticulously placed name-drop.
It’s also an environment that, for its outward veneer of cosmopolitan civility, roils with political scheming, sexual power plays and brazen ambition. As Lydia goes about her days — meeting with a dilettante-ish patron (Mark Strong), being interviewed by a star-struck journalist, leading a master class at Juilliard — her facade never cracks. She oversees the tailoring of her suits with the same ferocious perfectionism and withering contempt for complacency that she brings to the vinyl pressings she’s making for Deutsche Grammophon.
Lydia is so impressively competent, the social space she moves in so stylish and discrete, that it has no option but to come crashing down. “Tár” is an anatomy of that inevitable descent, prompted by an email from a former student that metastasizes into a personal and professional crisis of operatic proportions.
Appropriately enough, Field’s script possesses its own musicality: He creates rapturous curlicues of heady dialogue that on its surface explores the nuances of post-#MeToo standards of workplace behavior and what has come to be known as cancel culture. Those thematic elements give “Tár” its frissons of resonance and ambiguity, with Lydia making a persuasive case for separating art from the artist. When she’s finally confronted with her own infractions, what were abstract arguments become increasingly germane, and it becomes clear that what we think we’re watching — an illustrious career brought low by bad behavior, the twist being that the malefactor is a woman — is something else entirely.
That something is more interior, more chaotic, and in many ways more disturbing, and it’s exquisitely limned by Field, who doles out information with tensely judicious restraint. No sooner are we ensconced in the soothing world that Lydia edgily inhabits than we discover that all those nervous twitches and superstitions aren’t the mannerisms of an egocentric artist. They’re talismans, deployed to fend off disorder and a creeping dread that, when it arrives, overmatches even Lydia’s lacerating ego and icy self-control.
This makes “Tár” sound grim, which it isn’t. Field has made a film about exploitation and selfloathing and compulsion, but with an extravagant eye for beauty and surface polish that makes it deeply pleasurable to watch. .
Then there’s the humor, which is so sly that it seems to operate on a frequency all its own. By far “Tár’s” best joke is saved for last, when Field speeds up the metronome and sends Lydia on a dizzying spiral that takes her far from Berlin, in a place where personal, professional and aesthetic reckoning land like a dissonant chord. The moral of the story seems simple enough: Keep it in your pants, boys and girls, lest you wind up in what could easily pass for sheer hell.