Feather

I was considering avoiding TÁR (2022) - not sure why. Maybe too political, like it would angry up my blood. But Ms. Spenser wanted to try it out, so we did.

We meet Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) being interviewed on stage by (the real) Adam Gopnik (didn't we see this trope in The French Dispatch?). Her speaking style is the perfect cod-intellectual style we expect of TED talkers. She discusses her drive to record all of Mahler's symphony, especially the Fifth. 

We get to see her teaching at Juilliard, where students are conducting a "difficult" atonal, percussive piece. She challenges them to return to the more emotionally engaging classics like Bach. A black student says he can't relate to a white, cis, hetero breeder like Bach. Their dialog gets a little heated, and is of course, recorded.

We meet her mentor, a rich old banker. We meet her devoted, timid assistant Noemie Merlant. Tar is also married to Nina Hoss, her first violin. They are raiding a little girl together. All seems fine for a talented, engaged artist. But she also gets messages from a young woman who she apparently mentored - a woman who later kills herself. Tar scrambles to delete all emails and evidence of their relationship. Even Merlant seems to find this troubling.

Tar also meets with a Russian cellist, and manipulates the orchestra into making her the sololist for an Elgar concerti. She also tries to ease out her assistant conductor, a somewhat stodgy Alan Corduner. He doesn't take it well. So she's making enemies and stirring resentments, and she is also having troubling dreams, and even hearing screams when out jogging. 

When a somewhat edited version of her fight with the Juilliard student goes viral, it all comes crashing down.

I was afraid that this movie was going to be a sort of a Disclosure-style, reverse sexual discrimination thing. It wasn't that at all - it was more a look at talent, power, hubris, ambition and humanity. Lydia Tar is arrogant, but could back it up with great conducting. But she cut so many corners, built so many myths and false facades, that she had to fall. She winds up in Thailand, working with children, scoring comicbook movies (video games?). A fall for sure, but also, like so many of the "cancelled", far from complete obscurity. 

So, very interesting and nuanced plot and characters. Add to that some lovely filmmaking - partly just what I call the special effect of Cate Blanchett's face (I might have said that about Tilda Swinton actually, another striking, pale and androgynous face). The music was ravishing, but frankly, I wished there had been more of it.

I expected this movie to give more attention to the various lesbian romances. I was thinking of this as a sort of follow up to Todd Haynes' Carol. But this movie is directed by Todd Field, a totally different cat.