![]() Or how she responds to seeing her daughter’s stuffed animals arranged like an orchestra, with each bearing a baton. “I’ll get you,” she threatens - and you know she means it. The way she diverts, like a shark with a new scent, across a school playground to buttonhole her daughter’s bully. It’s clear that Lydia, too, is a force of headlong momentum.Īnd it can be devilish fun to see Lydia in motion. “Music is movement,” Bernstein is heard saying in an old recording during the film. She may always be in some sense performing, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t being genuinely herself. But when she’s rehearsing Mahler’s Fifth with the orchestra or in the full thrall of the music, Lydia is masterful. Lydia spends much of “Tár” running her considerable business, manipulating the inner-workings of the philharmonic with her personal assistant (Noémie Merlant) and eyeing a young Russian cellist (Sophie Kauer). Lydia’s perspective will rile some and be applauded by others, but in her smooth torrent of words she also makes less controversial, sincere arguments for “sublimating” and “obliterating” one’s self before art. One describes himself as “a BIPOC pangender person” who is “not into Bach.” He shakes as Lydia, calmly tears into him as “a robot.” “Don’t be so eager to be offended,” she says. The first such beguiling scene places Lydia, who describes herself off-handedly as “a U-Haul lesbian,” as a guest lecturer at Julliard with aspiring conductors. The answers Fields supplies are not always satisfying, but for much of the film, he and Blanchett orchestrate a mesmerizing character study. Just how deeply connected is Lydia’s cruelty to her genius? We follow Lydia’s every move with a mix of awe (she is genuinely brilliant), curiosity (how much can she get away with?) and wonder. It’s Fields’ first film in 16 years, following the uneven 2006 misfire “Little Children” and his assured Oscar-nominated 2001 debut, “In the Bedroom.” At 2 hours and 38 minutes, you can almost feel him trying to make up for the lost years in “Tár.” Into it he funnels a gripping portrait of power and art, rigorous and devastating in its exactitude, while impressively less definite about a host of hot-button issues like so-called cancel culture, identity politics and #MeToo.īut though Lydia’s mounting issues - whispers about her propensity to groom young female players as her lovers the suicide of a former trainee conductor following Lydia’s blacklisting of her a young daughter (Mila Bogojevic) she leaves largely for her wife and philharmonic concertmaster (the brilliant Nina Hoss) to care for - are increasingly public, “Tár” is a thoroughly intimate film. “Tár,” written and directed by Fields, is, itself, distinguished by time. It’s in these chilly, highbrow environs that Lydia operates with exquisite intellect and ruthless cunning - and Blanchett gives a colossal tour-de-force performance that may be the finest of her career, a career as decorated as Lydia’s. ![]() The film is shot by Florian Hoffmeister with a cool, almost documentary-like perspective. ![]() ![]() ![]() The spaces Lydia occupies are crisply contemporary architectures. “Tár,” which opens in theaters Friday, is situated in a very real high-art, big-media world. Yet an introductory, fleeting moment of a phone camera pointed at an asleep Lydia, with mocking texts filling the screen, presages that the conductor’s rarified perch may be in jeopardy. Her listed accomplishments - conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, protégée of Leonard Bernstein, a glass ceiling-shattering figure of the classical music world, an EGOT-winner with a new memoir, “Tár on “Tár,” out - are as impressive as her regal, polished stage presence. Just after the opening credits roll, Lydia is there on a gleaming New York stage before a rapt audience being interviewed at length, and with almost oppressive accuracy for such fawning exchanges, by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (as himself). The way Blanchett says this, with her arms swirling and shaping the air like clay, makes you believe, yes, she really can stop time.īut in “Tár” - a movie that likewise measures and sculpts moments with intense precision - time may be catching up with Lydia. Lydia, a world-renown conductor, is explaining her art as more than waving a baton around - not a mere “human metronome” - but rather an almost god-like ability to mold and contort time. “Time is the thing,” says Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) in Todd Fields’ “Tár.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |