Tár (2022)

 

This is a movie that wants to be confusing.  Lydia's past is revealed to us only in brief, blurry visions.  She hears mysterious sounds from unidentifiable sources.  They could be real, or they could be hallucinations or dreams.  Maybe they're ghosts.  The confusion is partly why I disagree with Richard Brody, who finds it obvious that Tár is an attack on identity politics.  But at least he acknowledges that the movie is like this, even if he thinks its only purpose is to give "plausible deniability to its conservative button-pushing." 

There is a scene in which Lydia publicly lambastes a student at Juilliard for saying that Bach's misogynistic life makes it hard for them to take his music seriously.  Lydia offers some typical culture-war talking points against this character.  The way this interaction eventually comes back to bite her is one of the more nonsensical things I've seen in a movie this year.  A student posts an edited video of Lydia's class on social media, causing backlash.  But it's an edit so obvious that no one would fall for it.  At first I thought the characters in the movie took the video as a joke at Lydia's expense, but they talked about it as if they thought the edit was meant to be taken seriously.  It's also unnecessary for the video to have been edited.  For anyone who would be outraged by it, what Lydia actually said and did in that scene would have been more than enough to piss them off.

Fortunately, aside from this scene, this movie takes well over an hour before getting into any "topical" material.  In actuality, it's more of a movie about environments. The film opens with the many sophisticated, expensive steps of preparing Lydia's wardrobe before her appearance on stage for an interview with Adam Gopnik, set to his voiceover explaining who she is to the audience.

The interview proceeds for quite a long time, much of it with the camera simply holding on Blanchett. They discuss finer points of music theory that, realistically, will be something most viewers of the film have no background for.  (Though even a layperson can tell she really isn't saying much, if they pay attention.) The auditorium where the interview is happening is a sleek establishment endowed with wealth. Almost the whole film takes place in environments like this, or else in high-end restaurants or cafés, or in Lydia's home, which Brody describes as "a Brutalist apartment of a pristine monumentality." "Monumentality" is right: the film makes sure we understand the size of these places, despite the fact that it focuses only on a few characters who pass through them.

At the same time, there are intrusions from the outside of this world, depicted in such conspicuous ways it's almost too obvious. Lydia goes running on the streets of Berlin.  She hears someone screaming in the woods and starts looking for them, but ultimately turns away.  Late in the film, she passes by graffiti on a poster advertising her new performance.  We see Lydia at work composing music, but frequently when she works, some unwelcome, unexpected noise interrupts the soundscape that must be passing through her head.  A cell phone rings, or someone knocks on the door.  Eventually, the tables are turned on her when someone finds her music to be intrusive noise. There are other soundscapes in the world, the objects of someone else's valuable attention.

We have to wonder if she knows when people see through her.  Her wife, Sharon, is one of the members of the orchestra, and scenes with the orchestra frequently cut to Sharon's face when she reacts to something Lydia does.  When Lydia proposes that they perform Elgar's cello concerto and select a soloist from among the orchestra's own ranks, the first thing we see is the elated reaction of the cellist who assumes she will perform the solo.  But Lydia immediately comes up with a flimsy excuse to hold auditions of all the section members in an effort to give the solo to Olga, a new, young cellist Lydia is attracted to.  Right away, the senior cellist looks hurt and suspicious, and none of the section members play along.  We don't know how much Lydia notices.  If she knows, she acts like it doesn't matter, though she apparently does feel guilt.

The film has proven to be a Rorschach test.  If you want, you can lay out the evidence against Lydia, or jeer at her students.  It's strange to see a movie that builds up a picture of "cancel culture," identity politics, what have you, seemingly based on internet caricatures, where it also pitilessly laughs at the character under fire and doesn't really seem to care about the outcome. 

What matters in the end is not her guilt.  It's that the way she defends against her own guilty conscience is to retreat into the supposed neutrality and "divinity" of art.  She can't go two sentences without making some namedrop or other reference.  Early on in the film, she even seems somewhat disturbed by the suggestion that Beethoven wasn't as original as she thought.  Some ask why this movie takes place in the world of classical music, rather than some other art scene.  I'd say it's because classical musicians' names are the ones often presented as icons of genius.  We're more likely to say that someone remarkable is the "Beethoven" or "Mozart" of their field than the "Orson Welles."  The importance of art is something the film really believes in, but she takes it far too personally.  She never manages to convince anyone of anything, even when talking to a strawman.

And for what it's worth, there's an angle on identity politics implicit in this film that has nothing to do with cancel culture.  It's how the rhetoric wielded by queer people in their own defense has changed over time.  From Lydia, it's the assimilationist insistence that they're no different from anyone else—why can't she and Beethoven be the same?  From the student, it's the more current insistence on the relevance of different experiences.

Again, it's about the experiencing the textures of a rarefied world, in the presence of modern architecture, classical music, and knowledgeable, ambitious people.  It's about the enticing reality of art's power, but also how anything that entices you can be used to undermine you.  People who know a lot of big words and platitudes are especially good at this.  You feel out its world's boundaries, what someone can get away with before being ejected.  These qualities were what I appreciated about the film, despite the seizes at low-hanging fruit.