Tár on Tár

Critical reactions to Tár—the riveting, haunting tour de force that marks Todd Field’s return to directing—may raise the suspicions of those weary of the prevailing culture wars. The film has been alternately hailed and reviled as a commentary on cancellation and its discontents, as well as on the ascendant digital culture’s high-stakes game of stardom on the one hand and ostracization on the other. Tár certainly speaks to these issues, but Field seems more interested in questions closer to the soul: How is artistic greatness made (or produced, or feigned), and what does this mean for those who draw near to its flame? And how are artists themselves influenced, created or even destroyed in contact with their audiences?

The film probes these questions by clinging closely, even unsettlingly, to its titular lead, the virtuosic conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) whose past indiscretions finally catch up to her. Recurring scenes, for instance, show Tár running alone in the woods and alleys near her Berlin apartment. We first observe Tár in these scenes as she sees herself: sleek as an apex predator, in full command of the audience’s intimate third-person gaze. Then we tilt into the first person as the landscape darkens, and we sense that there’s something, a monster, closing in—and that the scene of this encounter may be Tár’s dawning horror at recognizing herself, briefly and then all at once.

With its psychological bent, the film feels closer to a digital-age tale of the uncanny than a political fable. Somehow, the audience feels with increasing dread, Lydia Tár has got it all wrong. And not just in her apparent pastimes of petty maneuverings, hushed affairs and cruel retributions; there is something else deeply akilter in her psyche that is bubbling up to the surface. Where, we begin to wonder, is the grand maestro’s weak link? What lies at the root of her break with reality?

Field offers no easy answers, but rather a rich trail of clues. The first comes in the film’s opening scene, in which Tár outlines her divergence from her mentor Leonard Bernstein to a fawning interviewer at a New Yorker Festival event. She likens her approach to that of the indigenous Shipibo-Conibo of Peru, who “receive” a song only “if the singer is there … on the same side of the spirit that created it. And in that way the past and the present converge.” She contrasts this approach with Bernstein’s belief in “teshuva, the Talmudic power to reach back into time and transform the significance of one’s past deeds.” At issue is how a work of music reaches its audience through time: Must this encounter always be direct, face-to-face, as if confronting a single, immutable moment? Or, as Bernstein’s approach would have it, does time alter the work? Is the past (even of great works, and even of great individuals) continuously refreshed and altered by those who follow, and who receive this work in a new present?

The lines at first feel like a sound bite, meant to impress the kind of people who read the New Yorker. But they reverberate throughout the film as it becomes clear that Tár’s essence as a conductor is her sense of proximity, even subservience, to the original artist. She tells her Juilliard students: “You must service the composer … you must in fact stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself.” She tells a patron and amateur conducting protégé that her “interpretation” of a symphony was in the composer’s notes all along. And she asks orchestra members, students and audiences the same searching question: “What was the composer’s intent?”

The force of Tár’s aesthetic is equally enthralling, inspiring and daunting. And yet as the film unfolds, its self-serving nature also becomes apparent. The Composer, in Tár’s world, is the inalterable source, and the Conductor the omnipotent gatekeeper; she controls the flow of time that enables both orchestra and audience to tap into that moment. As she puts it elsewhere in her opening interview, “Time is the essential piece of interpretation. You cannot start without me; I start the clock.”

For the audience, a growing skepticism of this too-convenient aesthetic is paired with increasing evidence that Tár’s “service” is not so much self-obliteration as its opposite: an unrelenting dominance, both over the room (as in her send-up of a snobbish Juilliard student, which begins in a rousing tone but veers quickly toward bullying) and over others (colleagues and lovers alike are used and discarded). It is also a form of grim self-dominance: Tár’s obsessive tics, gestures and wardrobe revisions all seem aimed at bringing herself in line, shaping Lydia Tár the Great out of the woman we later glimpse, when she is recognized in her childhood home in Staten Island, as Linda Tarr, the person.

The product of such a process, Field suggests, may well be greatness of art and of artist; but there is a human cost, a toll paid through the fracturing of the psyche, a life lived in perpetual third person. Tár’s drama and dread frequently converge with the satirical, and so perhaps the best example of this self-estrangement is the conductor’s much-anticipated memoir, whose title (we learn from her breathless interviewer) is Tár on Tár—at once sardonic and, as it is repeated throughout the film, increasingly ominous.

Tár’s weak link is none other than the contact of this seemingly immutable composer-conductor-audience order with the flow of time—with what she has done over a span of decades to others and to herself. The film’s tempo and Tár’s metronome pick up speed as Lydia Tár loses control over the plot; as those whom she has wronged reach back in time (as at least one review noted, a late lover’s supernatural influence may make this reckoning a literal one) and alter her name, her reputation, her life’s work. In one of the film’s final scenes, Lydia discovers to her horror that the orchestra’s “clock” has started without her: she has fallen from eternity back into the world and her own ravaged first-person experience.

Others have pointed out the irony of Tár’s closing concert, which is in service of a franchise titled (for the final gag of the film) Monster Hunter. The monster has indeed been hunted; but it would be a mistake to assume that we are meant to reject all Tár stands for as irredeemably monstrous. There are no easy paths to greatness; Tár’s aesthetic is flawed and vulnerable, but it is also compelling and beautiful—and perhaps, for one eternal moment, transcendent.

There may, too, be a silver lining in the suggestion that Bernstein’s approach better survives the passage of generations. For if a great artist cannot escape time, neither is her denouement ever final. This possibility is indicated by Bernstein’s reference to the Hebrew “teshuva,” whose linguistic root denotes “returning,” but which is most commonly translated as repentance. Through teshuva, one atones for one’s past, and thereby returns to oneself.