Tar 2022

 

Tar 2022

First of all I must note Cate Blanchett's towering performance as a famous but flawed orchestra conductor. This is a complex great role for her and she covers it like a silken piece of cloth floating down from above. She is so complete and sure in her role as Lydia Tar that at times I thought this person really existed, the opening interview with her and the real Adam Gopnik on stage at a concert hall helped this illusion. She is famous, talented and tangy, sometimes rude and at this point in time she is the conductor of The Berlin Philharmonic the first female to get this high honor.

There she lives in Berlin with her wife and their young adopted daughter who has problems of her own. The problems come out as lydia once did in her sexual orientation and these troubling incidents both with her daughter and Tar get more pronounced as this long movie goes on. A former student and probably lover commits suicide which causes great upheaval in her life and career and starts the ball of twine to unravel and start rolling. She tries to eradicate all traces of her relationship with the student and involves her much put upon and neglected assistant Francesca in the misdeed. Indeed.

We see her in all sorts of activities both domestic and in her career, teaching a seminar that gets nasty and in her stressful conducting duties that also sometimes get nasty. What to think of her? She does bad things including treating the people close to her with distance, aloofness and disdain, and works on taking down a few of them. Later in the film she has a physical public confrontation with a fellow conductor played by Mark Strong that is startling and shocking, and yet I was still drawn to her. We don't know much about her background, but towards the end of the film, we get a glimpse of her early life when she returns home to her family's house in Staten Island of all places and has a sharp bitter short encounter with her brother.

She hears noises late at night, and on a run through a park she hears but cannot see a female screaming. This scene brought to mind the scene in the park in “Blow Up” where David Hemmings also an artist thinks he may have seen a murder being committed. She is also having low level problems with her wife acted by the great Nina Hoss who plays in the orchestra and is also the concertmaster. Their child, is being bulled at school and Lydia confronts and threatens the child doing the bullying, another girl by the way one day after school. A dangerous moment. Oh her downfall is coming and is huge, demeaning and damaging. She is we see a careful sexual predator, and this is about to catch up with her Her carefulness is not as careful as she thought as she is being stalked and sent threatening emails and is physically attacked and badly beaten. We don't witness the attack only the results on her bruised face.
What is striking (and disturbing) about the film is that the character is an abusive woman, not the usual abusive man of which we have become used to dealing with and seeing both in real life and fiction. Difficult and mean women in high power jobs and positions is nothing new and I have dealt and known some in my life and career as we probably all have. Still it was not easy for me to digest her behavior or accept it.

The director and writer of the film Todd Field was an actor and appeared in quite a few movies and tv shows and is best known for his small but pivotal role in Stanley Kubrick's last film “Eyes Wide Shut” before he directed his first “commercial film” the very good “In The Bedroom” followed by the equally good “Little Children” He waited 16 years before making Tar and let's hope he doesn't wait another 16 years before making another film. One of the ten best films of 2022