TAR is a movie about a hot conductor lady: A Dramaturgical Review [SPOILERS]

On a chilly afternoon sometime in September of 2013, I sat on the couch in my parents’ living room, listening to Daniel Barenboim conduct the Chicago Symphony orchestra through Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. This was the first piece by Mahler I had heard, and it awakened something in me - not only the awe of any young brass player’s first encounter with that soaring, piercing and blaring first trumpet part, but a feeling of expectant reverence that I currently associate with the music of several composers from Western Europe (chiefly Germany) who were each alive between 1680 and 1911. Adorno has described Mahler’s oeuvre as the expression of “totality;” the act (or attempted act) of encompassing an entire reality within a musical score, of sublimating abstract sounds into a grandiose large-scale quasi-narrative framework. It is the novelization of the symphony, an attempt at creating and expressing emotional stories on a scale not seen in that part of the world before, arguably, the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1824. To me, Mahler’s symphonies demand attention simply by being in the room. Listen to me and bask in my glory, they say, and you might feel, for a little while, as if you are part of something greater than yourself.

If Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is an exercise in totality, then Todd Field’s TAR is an exercise in trying to say everything so much that you ultimately end up saying nothing. Don’t get me wrong - there are a lot of things I love about TAR. Blanchett’s performance as the titular role is electrifying and extremely hot (there are few things that say “Mommi” better than Lydia Tar, in trousers and vest, sauntering away after firing her assistant conductor) and the musical portions are well-recorded and well-shot, expertly straddling the perilous knife’s edge between “symphony orchestra promotion video” and “someone came in and recorded the whole concert with their phone.” Noemie Merlant is fantastic as Francesca, Lydia’s assistant-slash-implied-illicit-lover, a role and performance which tug at the heartstrings and show, alternately, the eminent conductor’s tenderness and cruelty. I appreciated the almost Brechtian delineation of story beats by location; the graffitied streets and underpasses of Berlin, the bland and minimal-brutalist symphony orchestra venues, Lydia’s twin abodes, and the alleyways of Siam each bring their own connotation to our evolving uderstanding of Lydia’s psyche.

There are also many narrative threads within TAR which resolve in some combination of satisfaction and disquietedness. Much of the film feels like an unrelated pastiche of random events up until certain points at which the threads tighten, showing us the truth of either Lydia’s feelings or of the world around her. At the film’s opening (after four or five minutes of credits, which, like, I get that we’re trying to do credits at the beginning of movies but this was so jarring and strange that it was funny), we see the back of someone’s head, red hair staring intently at an empty stage where Lydia is about to speak with Adam Gopnik. Later, in an airport, we see red hair again, staring at Lydia as she arranges transportation to her New York hotel room. The implication of each shot is clear, or so we think: Lydia has a stalker. The subject is then ignored for around 75 minutes, at which point we finally see, in an intentionally-oddly-lit magazine photo, the face of Krista, a young fellow of Lydia’s mentorship program who has recently committed suicide, and is strongly implied to have been sexually abused by Lydia and blacklisted from nearly every major orchestra. It takes but a moment to notice Krista’s red hair, and that’s all we need to be given. The film is mostly comprised of episodes like this, with a strong setup implying one emotion or course of events being reversed as we see it through another lens. In another sequence, Lydia uses her old apartment in Berlin as a composition studio, and she is frequently interrupted by a computerized beeping - a repeated major third which Lydia then mockingly parrots on the piano. We hear this beeping many times, and each time, we are shown exactly how little Lydia thinks of the interruption. Partway through the film, seemingly at random, a neighbour bangs at the door asking if Lydia has seen her mother’s newspaper. The conductor’s derision is palpable. Then, just as things begin to go wrong for Lydia, she is interrupted by her neighbour yet again. The neighbour’s garbled English shrouds her intent until we see the inside of her apartment - her mother has fallen and is in need of medical aid. The insistent beeping, derided by Lydia every time she heard it previously was signalling that a vulnerable senior was in danger. Moments like these are the fabric of TAR - the film’s momentum is a cascading series of setups and payoffs, and, at its best, the payoffs can be truly wrenching voltes which draw us further into the inexorable demise of Lydia’s career, as well as the ways in which her cruel self-centredness impacts those around her.

Sometimes, though, the film is not at its best, and the tight weave of expectation and subversion ends up feeling muddled. It seems to me as if this effect often stems from Field’s willingness to challenge the audience, and not simply tell them what to think (such as in the ending) - however, there are portions, especially during Blanchett’s monologues, where I felt as if Field was speaking directly to me through the film, and not in the good way. It’s nothing truly substantial, just the occasional oddity in framing that makes me wonder if Field has ever actually been in a symphony orchestra audition or a Juilliard conducting seminar (Not that I have been in either of those situations specifically, but I have met plenty of people who have, and I do have two degrees in classical music so I’ve picked up the general vibe of these spaces). One aspect of TAR which disappointed me was the upholding, however ironically, of the mystique and pretense of classical music, as a place in which geniuses operate and “it’s a whole magical effort to play this music that’s written by geniuses and performed and conducted by their genius friends who devote themselves heroically to the art,” et cetera. It’s a pretense that Field is obviously critical of, but only to a point - the way in which the critique is brought to our attention itself reveals the filmmakers’ true intent. In no way does TAR assert that Lydia’s actions are justified because of her artistic prowess - one might argue that the film’s focus on the fall of an abusive genius constitutes criticism of that idea in and of itself - but the very notion of classical music, its trappings and conventions, are brought to bear upon the viewer in an almost fetishistic way. I almost groaned audibly in the theatre when the opening montage showed Lydia reverently opening a large-size performance score of Mahler’s Fifth symphony. It’s these elements that one catches only fleetingly, such as in a scene where Lydia is conducting the end of the fourth movement of the symphony. Blanchett’s almost-orgasmic drawing-out of the final 4-3 suspension in the low violins shows us a facet her character, yes, but is done in a way which feels extremely sympathetic; is her immense cruelty to those around her worth it, just for that moment of beauty? The film does not give us an answer, but it does ask the question by showing us what it claims to be transcendent beauty, by making us sympathetic to Lydia’s perspective as an absolute (albeit momentary) truth. Another way in which this topic is brought to our attention is in the contrast between the opening’s New Yorker interview and Lydia’s final appearance conducting music from Monster Hunter for an audience of cosplayers in Siam. The contrast between “high” and “low” culture, between imperial and nonimperial, feels absolutely intentional here, but it asks of us: which is better, or more pure, or more fit for Lydia’s awful greatness? Is the film showing us our biases, giving us exactly what we expect to see at the opening - a classical music genius being lauded by a prestigious journal - only to point an accusing figure as we empathize with Lydia’s terrible plight of having to conduct video game music for nonwhite people? Or is it attempting to show us an Aristotelian fall-from-grace narrative, all the above things being portrayed in a genuinely tragic light? The film’s stance isn’t clear, and it doesn’t need to be - I in fact found TAR’s reticence to explicitly moralize on any of its issues rather refreshing - but I generally found its ideas to be more sympathetic to the pursuit of fetishizing and mysticizing classical music than otherwise.

Beyond my personal disagreements with the ways in which TAR frames these issues, however, lie actual structural problems which I believe stem from the film trying to be two different stories at once. First, and most successfully, it is a meandering character study of Lydia Tar, hewn from small tableau-like scenes which seem unrelated when placed side by side but form an intricate lattice in context - a weave of intrigue and perspective in which we see Lydia both as the world sees her and as she sees herself. As mentioned previously, the film’s best moments emerge from this kind of structure. In addition, there is the implied Aristotelian tragic-heroic narrative discussed above, with regards to which the audience is expected to discern who is the hero and at what point the tragedy takes place. This forms a sort of arch bounding the film and preventing its musings from going too off-topic. The beginning and ending of TAR are the best examples of this, and also the instances in which this kind of storytelling is most effective; the intervening one hundred and twenty minutes of film, however, are much less compelling in this regard. Overall, our perception of Lydia’s arc is more lucid than the character herself, but the ambiguity and sometimes-confusing placement of certain story beats result in a conflict between these two narrative models. At times, the weave of tableaux becomes muddled and directionless, with the viewer feeling stranded as they watch Lydia bring her daughter to school, conduct the orchestra, and treat her assistant poorly. None of it feels egregiously superfluous - each scene does contribute appropriate momentum to the plot, and the flow of scene-to-scene editing is fine - but there were moments in which I desperately wished for one plot or another to emerge, rather than waiting through mountains of setup and sly connotation for a few great peaks of interest.

Additionally, TAR’s insistence on allowing the audience to interpret the film for themselves sometimes gets in the way of the coherence of every major arc. The film’s ambiguity often does it a disservice. Consider, for instance, the motive of maze-like spirals. We see them first drawn on Lydia’s metronome, then arranged in plasticine in her daughter’s bedroom, then scribbled on a page of Lydia’s book manuscript which her disgruntled former assistant, Francesca, has defaced. Is the implication that Lydia’s daughter and assistant were somehow colluding? We find spirals drawn on the metronome in a heart-stopping scene where Lydia hears her metronome active in the middle of the night, and finds it ticking away stowed in a cupboard. Later scenes show Lydia hearing mysterious noises in the middle of the night, only to discover they are a malfunction in the fridge. Are we meant to believe that Francesca has been breaking into Lydia’s house at night and setting the metronome, or is the metronome sequence simply imagined by the conductor? At one point, we see Lydia going for a run outside, and she begins to hear screaming in the nearby woods. She runs to investigate, but stops short of thick brush. This element only occurs once in the film. The film’s lack of clarity on these small points, while heightening the sense of ambiguity and dread as Lydia’s tragedy trudges towards its nadir, distracts the viewer from its greatest moments, and it’s truly a shame. TAR is trying to encompass totality, and succeeds in doing so in many instances, but unlike Mahler’s Fifth symphony, its goals aren’t as clear as they need to be, resulting in a work which can feel unfocused and convoluted simply for the sake of being so.

I can’t decide if I like or dislike TAR. Like the film itself, my feelings about Field’s work are nebulous and contradictory, emerging from a multitude of perspectives and a glittering mosaic of arguments and counterarguments drawn from memories and relationships. Like Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, it is a grandiloquent product, a gargantuan thing born out of ego and artistic prowess. Reflecting on it afterwards, I cannot help but admire the structural beauty of the thing, and the ways in which the creators draw the audience inward. In artistic terms, it is a monumental triumph, but would I enjoy watching it again? TAR reminds me of much mid- to late-twentieth-century contemporary classical music, grand oeuvres such as Gubaidalina’s Concordanza or Boulez’ Repons; technically and artistically masterful, expressions of human emotion at the highest level of expertise, but lost in themselves, drawn inward to nebulous questions of self and other rather than the grand narratives of Romanticism which were abandoned in postwar composition departments. TAR is an attempt at reconciling two narrative paradigms - the fall of a tragic figure versus the revelation of a character’s full self - but the effort seems halfhearted and incomplete.

The film’s greater achievement, in my mind, is its capacity to briefly hold thorny questions about the past and future of classical music with purpose and intent, not separating the strands of each point of view, but engaging with many of them simultaneously. TAR’s ability to draw us into its characters allows room for a multitude of perspectives, both from Lydia and from those around her. We see her avarice, her ambition, and her tenderness, often all at once, and we are made to both see things from her point of view and understand how destructive her personality is to her colleagues and loved ones. We watch her abuse her assistant, withhold lifesaving medication from her wife, cruelly insult a student, and drive a young person to suicide, but we also see her artistry, that rapturous resolution of B-flat into A in the first violins, the fleeting moments of transcendent beauty which have allowed her to rise to such a position of destructive power. Rather than being a straightforward commentary on online mob justice or abuse of power in classical music, TAR shows us the heart of the discourses which have consumed our lives and asks us what we think - it is not trying to be objective, nor is it trying to support one argument over another, but it simply is. TAR gives us evidence for and against our own ideas of the world not in a realistic and objective manner, but in an emotional manner constantly mediated by character and framing, and I wish more films were brave enough to do so.

If you’re going to see this movie, watch it at home so you can take a break to pee halfway through because it is long. Also, Cate Blanchett is hot as fuck and I would let her be mean to me anytime, butch or femme, 10/10 no notes.