TÁR (2022)

Score: 5 / 5

Easily claiming a spot in my top 10 favorites of the year, TÁR is the latest masterpiece by Todd Field. Field hasn't made a movie in, as far as I know, 16 years, but you'd never know it. His style, not unlike Tom Ford's (who similarly doesn't make nearly enough movies), is graceful and enigmatic, seductive and vicious. He seeks what amounts to the sublime, and he succeeds yet again in this haunting character-driven chamber piece. It's an arthouse film through and through, but of the Gothic variety that also encompasses films like Black Swan or Steve Jobs, centering on a great artist dealing with the cost of that greatness. There's a madness swirled into the proceedings, and an eroticism, that makes it all fiendishly satisfying.

When we meet Lydia Tár, played by arguably a career-best Cate Blanchett, she's entering an interview with Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker in a concert hall. The audience offers her generous applause; she is a world-renowned composer and conductor (and pianist and Juilliard professor and ethnomusicologist) who specializes in classical music, so her distinction of being an EGOT winner is all the more unique. She's been recording Mahler's symphonies to re-popularize them, and she only has one recording left in the cycle. Her answers to his questions are profound (Field also wrote the breathtakingly brilliant screenplay), not least because she attributes to herself the godly power of controlling time while conducting. Her narcissism notwithstanding, it's also clear in this scene that she is not universally worshipped: some people appear to be either judging or envying her, and we see at least one phone screen with unkind messages being shared.

Lydia isn't a particularly lovable person. Her sensitive hearing, which helps her professionally and artistically, means that she's constantly on edge because of noise. The film's sound mixing and editing is phenomenal in actively moving around the surrounding space; you absolutely have to see this movie in a cinema or with excellent surround sound. The sound design puts us effectively in her headspace, where these almost violent intrusions come as both a shock and an annoyance. Lydia is also a pretty intense type-A person, immediately chastising her wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) at home for leaving too many lights on. Notably, her apartment (this one in Berlin) feels cold and modern, like a bunker, sparsely but impeccably decorated. During this interaction, we're also keyed into the secret that Lydia has been stealing and using Sharon's pills, to whatever end, and the well-known fact that Sharon is in fact Lydia's orchestra's concertmaster. Perhaps Lydia's greatest redeeming character element is her selfless love for her daughter Petra.

But despite their privately troubled marriage, the couple seems to work quite well in tandem. They are helped immensely by Lydia's quiet but efficient assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant), whom Lydia clearly relies upon but treats coldly. It's a sort of Devil Wears Prada situation, but without the inherent comedy. Oddly enough, to continue that reference, Lydia lunches in one scene with another conductor (Mark Strong) who clearly admires and lusts after her prestige but tries to veil it with flattery and gossip. She can see right through him, but her own hunger for influence allows her to share some insight into her callousness toward people who she deems no longer useful: she plans to "rotate" an elderly player before the upcoming concert and recording, which will rightfully be seen as a betrayal and insult.

By this point in the film, we've seen her callous, borderline cruel, demeanor firsthand already. During a masterclass at Juilliard, Lydia's passionate lecture on Bach becomes an ad hominem assault on identity politics, directed at a student who proclaims (banal and dispossessed, as Gen Z-ers do) that, as a queer person of color, they aren't down to study Bach due to his patriarchal tendencies in life. Personally, I veer closely toward Lydia's ideology in this scene, but seeing it on the warpath like this was enough to really make me anxious. It's a fascinating and surprisingly early scene, one that demonstrates as much about Lydia's character and the tone of the film as it does about Field, whose writing is so meticulously detailed and well-researched that I forgot more than once this is a work of fiction.

I don't really want to spoil the plot, of which there isn't a ton that's concrete. It's primarily a character study, though certain key things do happen to spur new facets of Lydia's personality into the proverbial spotlight. She's hungry for influence and power, but she's also utterly dedicated to her craft and to excellence for herself. She considers an artist's vague intentions to be the greatest affront to artists everywhere, and so she's always ready with reasons and justifications for everything she does, veiling her desires in couched and assured logical explanations. Even Field acts this way as director at times, marrying himself with his character. In the lecture, we see both sides clearly, but as the professor Lydia carries more weight. As she decides how to dismiss her elderly musician, we're only really given her perspective in full. When a former protégé commits suicide, when Lydia hires and flirts with a young cellist, when she presses Francesca to help her cover an affair, she's never really unreasonable. She's just kind of awful, but the film itself shows us how difficult it would be to win against her in any argument. Case in point: the young cellist auditions for us, just as for her, and she's really very talented; it isn't until after that Lydia's suspicions are confirmed that she's also a pretty young thing who is probably queer.

Todd Field's latest is a stunning, revelatory achievement in a year mostly void of this kind of arthouse film. And it crosses genres, which would make it just as accomplished and great in any year. While it fits squarely into the tortured artists subgenre, it also fits into the recently growing subgenre of abusive behavior by supposedly great artists or artistic institutions (think The Wife, A Star is Born, Blonde, and the upcoming She Said, to name just a few). I love that this particular film stands apart due to Field's lack of moralizing; he doesn't depict Lydia as a hero or villain, just as he both lambasts and praises the musical-business culture that created her, houses her, employs her, and kind of resents her. Just as with Little Children, his last feature film, he just wants to ask the questions and take a moment to live in the gray area of their consequences and implications. It's powerful, cerebrally and spiritually, and it helps that it's also one of the most technically accomplished and daring works this year.