Tár

Directed by Todd Field

Berlinale Top 3 (3/3)

USA 2022

Hasn’t this movie been hyped enough? you might ask. To which I say, dear hypothetical reader, no. I’m still quite salty that it didn’t get any Oscars, so we’re talking about it.

We open on a phone screen showing a middle-aged woman (Kate Blanchett) slumped against the seat of a private jet wearing a sleep mask. She obviously doesn’t know that she’s being filmed. Comments appear on the screen deriding her sleep schedule and age. This will not be the last time we see her being secretly filmed and discussed on a live stream of some sort, nor will it be the last time her privacy is invaded.

Coughing, paper crinkling, some chewing – she touches her ear nervously – muttering, more coughing – finally her assistant Francesca Lentini (Noémie Merlant) appears with a hand sanitizer and some pills. The world calms down. Misophonia – a phenomenon that causes strong negative emotions and reactions to certain trigger sounds including coughing, loud chewing, ticking or the clicking of a pen – all of which we will have the pleasure to listen to in surround sound during Tár’s descent into madness (my ears are already bleeding). New Yorker journalist Adam Gopnik, playing himself, comes up behind her, “Ready for them?”

In the best expositional scene I’ve seen in years, Adam lists off all of Lydia Tár’s accolades, while she’s sitting on-stage, trying not to fidget in front of the audience of the New Yorker press event she’s attending. “If you’re here then you know who she is. One of the most important musical figures of our era” – Adam begins. This is how the world sees Lydia Tár: she’s great at music, she is widely influential, has a tonne of awards, and is a trailblazer who was mentored by none other than Leonard Bernstein, or Lenny as she affectionately calls him. In short – she made it.

Gopnik’s exposition is intercut with scenes of Lydia and Francesca, the floor strewn with Deutsche Grammophon LPs of great men conducting Mahler’s Fifth. Like a game, they’re choosing which cover to imitate, how to style the cover of her own CD box-set of the live-recording of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, the last of nine symphonies of his, which she will perform as the head conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.

The actual cover of the official Tár soundtrack. The gall! The audacity!

Since the use of its fourth Movement, the Adagietto, in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), Mahler’s Fifth had an intimate relationship to film. With the piece itself being love incarnate, beginning with drawn out phrases of sweet longing, followed by buoyant strings and brass sections, the Adagietto has been used to showcase love in all its facets (longing, joy, obsession). In Death in Venice it both underlines the main character’s ennui and dissatisfaction with life and his art, and also accompanies, almost caresses, the man’s budding obsession with a young boy he sees on his journey to Venice – to a great and uncomfortable effect. The Adagietto also recently made its comeback in Decision to Leave (2022), directed by Park Chan-wook (one of my Top 10 of 2022), where it plays a crucial role in underlining the main character’s obsession with a suspect and his eventual professional and personal unraveling as he acts on his obsession.

Just by choosing to highlight the Adagietto, Todd Field gives us a glimpse into what Tár will be about – love, obsession, professional and personal unraveling due to one’s actions. Besides the Adagietto, however, Tár’s own composition titled “For Petra”, composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, who provided the entire score, plays a deciding role in the movie. Diegetically “For Petra” is also a labor of love, as Tár’s relationship with her daughter is the only genuine loving relationship in the movie, but Tár´s love sounds distinctly different that Mahler’s. Where Mahler teased longing and unabashed joy out of the strings, Guðnadottir (Tár) pulls them into mechanical sound formations, cold and almost robotic in nature. However, right at the end of the piece, the formations start to quiver, to fall apart and become tender and soft, before petering out into nothingness. 

But for now Gopnik continues to list Tár’s accolades, while she and Francesca are shown to settle on the cover reading “GUSTAV MAHLER. SYMPHONIE NO.5 – BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER. CLAUDIO ABBADO.” showing Abbado annotating the score, while self-importantly sitting in a philharmonic hall. They proceed to imitate the picture in style by making a custom-tailored suit, similar to the one Abbado is wearing, as well as putting theater seats in front of a mirror in Tár’s apartment, so that she can practice the pose. It is also made clear that her and Francesca are in a relationship at the beginning of this decision making process, but that the relationship is over by the time Tár poses in front of the mirror, alone.

In the final moments of Adam’s introduction, Francesca steps into frame and creepily, almost robotically lip synchs what is said on stage – she doesn’t look happy.

During the interview itself, where Tár shows herself to be very charming and excited for the recording of Mahler’s Fifth, saying that she chose love as the main motif for her direction of this particular piece, we see a red-headed woman observing from the back of the hall. She is later revealed to be Krista Taylor (Sylvia Flote), a former fellow at the Accordion Conducting Fellowship, Tár’s scholarship program for female conductors, who, for some reason, bugs Francesca relentlessly with unsettling e-mails which Tár instructs her to ignore.

Pictured: Francesca looking not happy.

Next up is a meeting with her business partner Eliot Kaplan (Mark Strong), with whom she manages the scholarship program, he himself an aspiring conductor. Despite having a strained, almost antagonistic relationship with Tár, he tries to pick her brain on the matter of conducting, but has to  reluctantly accept her patronizing comments to “do his own thing”. The power dynamics are clear – he has to suck up to her (sic!).

The phrase “sucking up” is never used in the dialogue directly, but the concept remains an extensive motif when it comes to the power dynamics in the classical music scene, as it is portrayed in the movie. In a particularly intense scene with her wife, we’re told how Tár had to learn the “lay of the land” to become the head conductor in Berlin, implying that this community, as many others, is not at all a meritocracy, but has its own set of arbitrary rules and politics. Her wining and dining the former head conductor Andris Davis (Julian Glover), even eight years after she took over from him, to stay on his good side is just one example of many. Eventually she accrues enough power to be “sucked up” to, and also to have the privilege to forget her own struggles and ignore or deride the struggles of others. The origin of this expression (schoolboy slang pertaining to the performance of oral sex to get into someone’s good graces) is also not lost on the movie, as we later learn how Tár (ab)uses her power.

At a masterclass at Juilliard, Tár embarrasses a kid, who, in his own words, doesn’t like Bach, because he was a white straight cis man (a statement that is both valid and kind of dumb). She counters with a surface-level good argument pointing out that, when he is out of college and a working musician, he certainly wouldn’t want to be judged exclusively on his race or sexual orientation alone. She, of course, obfuscates the fact that, as a black queer man, he probably has been judged by exactly these aspects his entire life. She also (conveniently) forgets that, by admission of her own wife, they “barely survived” the headlines when they came out as a couple. As he storms out of the class, having called her bitch (which she was), she calls him a robot, a word that she uses frequently to describe people she doesn’t like.

Back in Berlin, we finally get to see why people put up her in the first place. Standing at the podium, magnificent, overlooking the entire orchestra, hearing every single instrument, every wrong intonation, every wrong inclination, shaping Mahler’s symphony in her own image – driven, grandiose, self-absorbed.

Power

Surrounded by both admiration and (very silent) contempt, she lives her life with her wife Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), the concertmaster of the orchestra. As we’ve seen in the opening scene with Francesca, as well as a short scene in New York, indicating that she hooked up with someone the evening before returning to Berlin, Tár frequently cheats on Sharon as well as keeps her in the dark regarding many things in her life. One can only assume why Sharon stays with her, but one of the reasons is probably their daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic), who is the only person who calls her Lydia and whom Tár genuinely loves.

At the height of her career and current obsession with finishing Mahler’s symphony cycle, her world comes crashing down, just as she starts a new cycle of her own. Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), a new very young and energetic cellist from Russia, arrives for an audition at the orchestra. Tár is immediately smitten with her and we get to experience her pattern of abuse first hand.

By changing her scores at the audition, she gets Olga into the orchestra. During a mandatory dinner with her, Tár scopes out how she can pull the young woman deeper into her orbit. After the cellist tells her that she excelled at playing the solo in the Elgar Concerto in a Russian youth orchestra, she decides the next day to perform the concerto as a companion piece at the live recording. By manipulating some more, she finally accomplishes the task of tacitly taking away the solo from the first cellist of the orchestra and giving it to Olga, which ensures private one-on-one rehearsals until the concert. This entire maneuver comes so naturally to her, one has to wonder how many times she did something like that before.

Actual cellist Sophie Kauer as Olga

Fortunately for Olga (unfortunately for everyone else), Krista Taylor commits suicide during this “wooing” phase, and Tár reacts by instructing Francesca to delete her entire correspondence with Krista. Francesca is obviously distraught, lamenting how close the three of them were at one point, to which Tár responds by saying that they couldn’t have done anything to prevent it and that Krista started to “make demands” and that she was disturbed. After Francesca leaves, Tár opens her own e-mails regarding Krista. We see what Olga can expect, if she doesn’t comply with the next phase of Tár’s advances. E-mail upon e-mail pops up on screen, all of them addressed to different orchestras, in which Tár systematically blackballs Krista’s budding career by describing her as disturbed, crazy and subsequently a danger to any orchestra that would take a chance on her.

The scene at the masterclass comes to mind. Was is satisfying when Tár “owned” the student? When he stormed out of the room? I bet that for some it was, and the division between the people who enjoyed her taking down a much too sensitive kid and those who didn’t informs how the movie is going to be perceived as it takes us into the rabbit hole of accusations and “cancel culture”.

I mean, what if Krista actually WAS crazy and obsessed with Tár, as she later claims in a board meeting of the Philharmonic, when the news of the suicide reach them and rumors of sexual misconduct at Accordion start surfacing? What if Olga is totally taking advantage of Tár’s weaknesses and poor impulse control? (Spoiler: she isn’t. Olga doesn’t have any power. Even her ability to stay in the country is dependent on Lydia’s mood swings.)

As Tár one day decides to snoop around in Francesca’s laptop to check whether she’s deleted her correspondence with Krista, as instructed, and finds out that she didn’t, she immediately retaliates by denying Francesca the spot as her co-conductor, having ousted the last one out of spite and because he clicked his pen too much (normal and understandable behavior from Tár). This spot has been promised to Francesca on the down-low for a long time, which was also the reason why she stayed on with Tár for so long. Francesca quits in the middle of the night and disappears from the movie, although her presence will be felt down the line.

On a trip to New York, promoting her memoir “Tár on Tár” (what a stupid title), she takes Olga with her, habitually initiating the next phase of her pattern, but her plans falter as Olga doesn’t show any interest in her, perpetually stares into her phone and flirts with boys (gasp!). As more and more accusations of sexual misconduct from other Accordion fellows surface, Tár has to appear in court for a deposition, where it is revealed that Francesca has handed over her correspondence with Krista (and maybe more) to the prosecutor. Although we don’t know the outcome of the deposition, Tár subsequently loses the control of the fellowship and her partnership with Kaplan.

During this entire ruinous period, Tár seems flabbergasted by every new development. The accusations, the realization that Olga is not at all interested in her and that she can’t do anything about it, now that her power is waning, everything takes her by surprise. Isn’t power supposed to insulate you from such things? Is this a witch hunt?

After she returns, everything else, her marriage and family life, her career, her sway over Olga, crumbles bit by bit, until we’re left with a life in shambles. This culminates in the live recording being conducted by Eliot, who she is convinced stole her score, as she couldn’t find it anywhere on the evening before she departed for New York. She reacts by sneaking into the philharmonic at the night of the recording and barreling onto the stage like a wrestler, ready to take down her opponent (genuinely terrifying performance by Blanchett there). She violently accosts Eliot, screaming to the orchestra to revert their attention to her and bellowing “This is my score!!! Mine!!!!”, while kicking Eliot in the ribs. All this during the beginning measures of the first part of the symphony, the Trauermarsch (the funeral march).

She … doesn’t take it well.

A disgraced Tár travels to New York once again to meet with CAMI Music (Columbia Artists Management, Inc.), for a “fresh start”. She will be conducting a youth orchestra in Cambodia for a live viewing of the Monster Hunter video game at a gaming convention. After her visit to CAMI, she finally returns … home.

Staten Island, a small-lot pre-war neighborhood. Tár exits the taxi and goes into a faded two-story house. Inside, a musty interior, an out-of tune piano. She ascends the stair, entering a small room. Music school awards made out to Linda Tarr line the bedroom wall, ice hockey trophies on the shelves. She opens a small closet, the upper shelf is lined with video tapes of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, all marked by year. Tár chooses one and plays it, Leonard Bernstein conducts Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. “Didn’t you feel triumphant?”, Bernstein begins. The nature of music, he continues, is not about “sharps and flats and chords and all that business,” it’s about what you feel when you hear it, it’s about “feelings that are so deep that we have not words for them”; and she cries.

Throughout the movie Tár speaks of Bernstein being her mentor, although it’s an obvious lie, as the timeline doesn’t add up. The people around her let her lie about it, intoxicated by her talent maybe, or by the prestige of being in the good graces of a woman conductor, a rare thing for sure. And here is one of the core questions of the movie: Why is Tár, an abuser, a woman? Why not make her a man, a Harvey Weinstein-esque monster, sleazy and grotesque? The same question was angrily posited by Marin Alsop, a real-life conductor, who was appalled by this depiction of a female conductor eerily similar to herself. She said that the movie and especially the character is an affront to women and feminism. Instead of depicting a woman in power as an uplifting tale of triumph, Todd Field decided to depict a woman in power abusing her power. Why?

The simple answer is: patriarchy still exists.

The longer answer is: remember “robot” being Tár’s favorite word for people she doesn’t like? In her mind a robot is inherently a slave, an imitator of the dominant societal narrative it sees around it. Gen Z and Millennials, following this logic, perceive our current narrative (being overly woke and permanently offended) and they adopt it, perform it, without thinking or active reflection on their part. At no point does she consider by whom her own narrative is shaped or that the world is changing. Young people are less and less impressed with the grandeur and self-importance of old crusty structures, while these structures mistake their waning reverence for vapidness. Tár, in her (very humble) opinion, is not a robot. She’s a genderless trailblazer, too talented to be stopped by petty identity politics.

She is, of course, wrong. First and foremost, she is a woman in a male-dominated field – a woman in the middle of a field, alone. Not a ballbuster, girl boss, sonic barrier breaker, but merely a transplant that has to assimilate to the existing rules to survive, rather than making or breaking them. Thus, Tár’s use of the power she got, while obliterating herself into the patriarchal structure, will also imitate the dominant system (trading sexual favors for opportunities, being a sexual predator without consequence, etc.). Does that excuse her preying on vulnerable young women? – Never! Does this explain why Todd Field made Tár a woman? – I think so.

Tár is not an affront to feminism, but rather more of commentary on the current state of the movement. Women from previous generations who ventured into male-dominated fields are still met with corrosive and dehumanizing expectations as soon as they “make it”. Once they do, they have to be paragons of feminism and representatives of all women ever. These expectations, expressed by, among others, Marin Alsop, can’t (don’t want to) deal with the fact that a woman in this position (fictional or not) can and will be the product of her environment and generation (and shitty character). She is not afforded the right to be a sleazy pervert. She is Woman! Why doesn’t she act like it?

Or, you know, it is another tragic tale of a great artist being claimed by cancel culture (lol, no!).

… decaying sound.