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Tar, 2022
Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) is a star conductor, and the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. She’s got an autobiography on the way, a lovely wife (Nina Hoss) and child (Mila Bogojevic), and audiences of admirers. But Tar is flirting with several looming scandals, including the death of a former mentee, her unfeeling treatment of her graduate students, and her questionable motives for pushing to add a very young and pretty new cellist (Sophie Kauer) to the orchestra.
Powered by Blanchett’s hilarious and disturbed performance, this is a very funny look at the collision of art, artist, and ego.
The IMDb classifies this film as “drama” and “music.” They are seriously remiss in not including “comedy” in their classification because, I’m sorry, this movie is hilarious.
We’ve all known people like Lydia Tar. And if we’re honest, maybe we’ve all been Lydia Tar, at least in some phase of our life. Desperate to have our intelligence, our wit, our specialness acknowledged. The problem is, Lydia Tar has been in this phase for seemingly all of her life, and now she’s acquiring a body count. Right from the start we see this in Blanchett’s Tar. The opening sequence sees Tar being interviewed, and we tune in as the interviewer is delivering a florid account of Tar’s professional life and accomplishments. When the interviewer notes that being an EGOT puts her in the company of many famous people and then ends his list with Mel Brooks, Tar cringes.
What follows in the interview is a heady mix of self-aggrandizing and contradictory statements. Tar, with false concern, notes that her wide range of talents might be a bad thing, because everyone expects a person to specialize. When asked about the role of gender in the classical music world, she notes that she has nothing to complain about, and neither do any of the other contemporary female conductors. It’s one thing to speak for oneself, but to speak for others . . . well. And what’s brilliant about this opening sequence is that we see that Tar does have quite a depth of knowledge. This is a person who knows what she’s talking about, and who has clearly put a lot of thought into it, both her role as conductor and music in general.
But somewhere along the way, things have warped for Tar. There is information, and there seems to be passion, but something about it is very empty. She has gotten good at turning a phrase about what it means to conduct, but somewhere in there, there is a disconnect. We see this in a scene where Tar gets into a confrontation with one of her students, Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist). Max is queer and non-binary, and sets Tar off when he tells her that he isn’t into Bach. While Max’s reasoning comes off as a bit shallow---dismissing Bach essentially as an old white guy---Tar’s response isn’t all the more enlightened. Instead of engaging in any kind of real conversation about Max’s discomfort with the classical canon, Tar uses every weapon that a teacher has to humiliate Max. On the surface it might look like teaching, but it’s not. It’s bullying. She begins with a sexual reference, alluding to the enjoyment of a contemporary composer as “masturbation”. She then uses her authority to get Max up onto the stage in front of his peers, where she then abandons him so that he is left facing the whole room plus Tar. She presents the false equivalency that Max not liking Bach is the same as people giving him a bad job rating due to his race or sexuality.
And this is the tragedy and the hilarity of Tar. It’s not that she’s wrong, per se. It’s that her fundamental motivation isn’t actually helping people learn or putting together the best orchestra: it’s bolstering her own profile and ego. Sometimes, those things go hand in hand. But the humor of the film derives from the way that her inability to take any little criticism spirals into petty confrontations, lies, and flexes of power.
For someone so seemingly intelligent, Tar manages to fall at even the most basic of hurdles. She has a loyal and dedicated assistant, who she strings along with promises of promotion that she never intends to fulfill. She has a gorgeous wife, but barely bothers to hide her attraction to the new cellist, Olga. When her daughter is being picked on at school, Tar goes immediately to the strategy of maliciously threatening the bully. And when she injures herself falling down on some stairs, she tells everyone that she was “attacked”.
I think that the brilliance of this film is the way that it resists commentary on what it is observing. We can see some unfairness in the way that Tar is treated as she heads for her comeuppance---such as a misleadingly edited YouTube video of her class that goes viral---but at the same time we can also see that Tar is guilty of many sins, both personal and professional. The film never tells us why Tar had it out for the young woman who died of suicide. In most of the scenes where Tar deals with it alone, even she doesn’t quite seem to know why she had to be so malicious. Does Tar deserve what happens to her? Pretty much everything she does falls into this fascinating ethical gray area where the question of appropriate consequences is somewhat nuanced.
I really liked the look of this film, as well as the unsettling atmosphere it creates. Tar suffers from a lot of anxiety, and many sequences do not make it clear if they are real or dreams. In one, Tar is on a run and hears a woman screaming in fear or pain. She tries to track the sound, but cannot. The woman screams and screams, and then we cut to Tar later in bed. Was this a dream? As things go downhill, Tar becomes more and more sensitive to the sounds around her, and the presence of those sounds looms larger and larger in her mind and in the film.
Just an all-around fabulous film, and if you aren’t laughing the whole way through, I’m not sure you’re doing it right.
Tar, 2022
Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) is a star conductor, and the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. She’s got an autobiography on the way, a lovely wife (Nina Hoss) and child (Mila Bogojevic), and audiences of admirers. But Tar is flirting with several looming scandals, including the death of a former mentee, her unfeeling treatment of her graduate students, and her questionable motives for pushing to add a very young and pretty new cellist (Sophie Kauer) to the orchestra.
Powered by Blanchett’s hilarious and disturbed performance, this is a very funny look at the collision of art, artist, and ego.
The IMDb classifies this film as “drama” and “music.” They are seriously remiss in not including “comedy” in their classification because, I’m sorry, this movie is hilarious.
We’ve all known people like Lydia Tar. And if we’re honest, maybe we’ve all been Lydia Tar, at least in some phase of our life. Desperate to have our intelligence, our wit, our specialness acknowledged. The problem is, Lydia Tar has been in this phase for seemingly all of her life, and now she’s acquiring a body count. Right from the start we see this in Blanchett’s Tar. The opening sequence sees Tar being interviewed, and we tune in as the interviewer is delivering a florid account of Tar’s professional life and accomplishments. When the interviewer notes that being an EGOT puts her in the company of many famous people and then ends his list with Mel Brooks, Tar cringes.
What follows in the interview is a heady mix of self-aggrandizing and contradictory statements. Tar, with false concern, notes that her wide range of talents might be a bad thing, because everyone expects a person to specialize. When asked about the role of gender in the classical music world, she notes that she has nothing to complain about, and neither do any of the other contemporary female conductors. It’s one thing to speak for oneself, but to speak for others . . . well. And what’s brilliant about this opening sequence is that we see that Tar does have quite a depth of knowledge. This is a person who knows what she’s talking about, and who has clearly put a lot of thought into it, both her role as conductor and music in general.
But somewhere along the way, things have warped for Tar. There is information, and there seems to be passion, but something about it is very empty. She has gotten good at turning a phrase about what it means to conduct, but somewhere in there, there is a disconnect. We see this in a scene where Tar gets into a confrontation with one of her students, Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist). Max is queer and non-binary, and sets Tar off when he tells her that he isn’t into Bach. While Max’s reasoning comes off as a bit shallow---dismissing Bach essentially as an old white guy---Tar’s response isn’t all the more enlightened. Instead of engaging in any kind of real conversation about Max’s discomfort with the classical canon, Tar uses every weapon that a teacher has to humiliate Max. On the surface it might look like teaching, but it’s not. It’s bullying. She begins with a sexual reference, alluding to the enjoyment of a contemporary composer as “masturbation”. She then uses her authority to get Max up onto the stage in front of his peers, where she then abandons him so that he is left facing the whole room plus Tar. She presents the false equivalency that Max not liking Bach is the same as people giving him a bad job rating due to his race or sexuality.
And this is the tragedy and the hilarity of Tar. It’s not that she’s wrong, per se. It’s that her fundamental motivation isn’t actually helping people learn or putting together the best orchestra: it’s bolstering her own profile and ego. Sometimes, those things go hand in hand. But the humor of the film derives from the way that her inability to take any little criticism spirals into petty confrontations, lies, and flexes of power.
For someone so seemingly intelligent, Tar manages to fall at even the most basic of hurdles. She has a loyal and dedicated assistant, who she strings along with promises of promotion that she never intends to fulfill. She has a gorgeous wife, but barely bothers to hide her attraction to the new cellist, Olga. When her daughter is being picked on at school, Tar goes immediately to the strategy of maliciously threatening the bully. And when she injures herself falling down on some stairs, she tells everyone that she was “attacked”.
I think that the brilliance of this film is the way that it resists commentary on what it is observing. We can see some unfairness in the way that Tar is treated as she heads for her comeuppance---such as a misleadingly edited YouTube video of her class that goes viral---but at the same time we can also see that Tar is guilty of many sins, both personal and professional. The film never tells us why Tar had it out for the young woman who died of suicide. In most of the scenes where Tar deals with it alone, even she doesn’t quite seem to know why she had to be so malicious. Does Tar deserve what happens to her? Pretty much everything she does falls into this fascinating ethical gray area where the question of appropriate consequences is somewhat nuanced.
I really liked the look of this film, as well as the unsettling atmosphere it creates. Tar suffers from a lot of anxiety, and many sequences do not make it clear if they are real or dreams. In one, Tar is on a run and hears a woman screaming in fear or pain. She tries to track the sound, but cannot. The woman screams and screams, and then we cut to Tar later in bed. Was this a dream? As things go downhill, Tar becomes more and more sensitive to the sounds around her, and the presence of those sounds looms larger and larger in her mind and in the film.
Just an all-around fabulous film, and if you aren’t laughing the whole way through, I’m not sure you’re doing it right.