Tar

  “Time is the thing,” conductor Lydia Tar tells her interviewer Adam Gopnik (unpersuasively played by Adam Gopnik). She’s referring to what her one hand controls on the orchestra while the other directs other elements. Time and its control — by us, on us — could be the central theme of the film. Especially if controlling time leads one to assume they can completely control others' lives.  Implicitly: Time wounds all heels. 

Perhaps that’s why the film opens with a juggling of time in its structure. The first thing we see is an assistant’s phone, with emails reporting the maestro’s awakening and mood. She is the central subject. We hear an Asian singer — which turns out to anticipate the closing scene, where the brilliant Western classical conductor has been reduced to working with a minor Asian orchestra. As we will see, this reduction is not racist.

When the opening credits unreel they are predominantly the technical ones that normally/always come at the end, after the plot has concluded, when everyone is leaving. Here the film conductor — director Todd Field — stops and uses time for at least two effects. He ensures this audience will pay the techs proper respect. (No-one leaves a Cate Blanchett film this early.) He also reserves the end-credit slot for the climactic acknowledgment of all the music that makes this work such a rich experience, even apart from its plot, acting and themes.  

The film is also very much of its time. It surfaces the harassment and sexual exploitation issues we daily hear about, from the classroom and the workplace up through our bastions of high culture. Some of the latter transgressors are named. These abusers are usually men, exploiting their power, personal and official, for their pleasure and advantage. But here the guilty power is a woman conductor, Lydia Tar (whose very name connotes a darkness crying out for retributive feathers).    

Gopnik’s opening recitation of Tar’s prominence may seem to go on too long. That heft is necessary to establish the heroine’s stature and power. Her achievement seems all the more impressive when we glimpse her origins — the shabby home she has kept, her loutish, resentful, righteous brother — and the high-power level on which she asserts her influence. A private flight takes her from Berlin to New York for her book opening and a deposition. Her past echoes in the abandoned ruin to which she follows the pretty cellist she hopes to seduce. Her literal fall and scarring there anticipate her end. 

Tar commands our early respect in her master class, especially when she confronts the young man’s Woke disdain for Bach: “Unfortunately, the architect of your soul appears to be social media.…

The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring kind of conformity.” We may return to her side when an illicit videotaping of that class is rejigged to incriminate her. But she loses us when — with the fury of a woman scorned — her undermining of a young woman’s career drives her to suicide. 

At her nadir, Lydia humiliates herself by physically attacking the conductor of her former orchestra, onstage. She’s reduced to conducting a minor Asian orchestra. Now she’s in a cheap hotel, seeking a massage in a brothel. Worse, her symphony is performing for a ludicrously costumed and masked audience — like a popular culture fan rally. This cultural fall is a bitter parody of the scholarly study she did for her doctorate, immersed in an isolated indigenous tribe’s music.

Cate Blanchett’s achievement here is remarkable. It included her learning German as well as piano and conducting performance. Her tough, determined character admirably pursues a lofty ambition. She channels Rocky in her sequences of running and boxing the heavy bag in the gym. This is a woman working a man’s power. 

Yet she still shows her softness in her scenes with the little girl, who by calling her Lydia suggests she’s the child of Lydia’s violinist lover. She tries to live a motherly warmth she never experienced. Performing sans rehearsal. In approaching the pretty young Russian cellist, however, the woman turns predator.

Perhaps that’s the film’s point. Acknowledging the history of male predators, the film deliberately broadens its target to include this woman. Sexist abuse and predation transcends gender, as Tar’s music transcends culture.