Photo by Justin Campbell on Unsplash
Symphony For One: Review of Tar
The opening of Todd Field’s psychological opus Tar is rather odd. The film’s credits fade in over a black background while a Shipibo Conibo Icaro (an indigenous Amazon people’s healing song) plays in the background. The oddly hypnotic music sung in a strange language over (what are usually) the final credits simultaneously confounds viewer expectations while forcing the audience to see those credits—instead of them being ignored by a departing audience. This approach is a microcosm of the unique and challenging narrative structure in Tar.
The film proper begins with an interview of Lydia Tar at The New Yorker Festival. She is a renowned pianist, composer, ethnomusicologist, and chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic; her accomplished and polished exterior is on full display for her adoring fans–and us. During the interview, in front of a fawning audience, she talks about upcoming projects, including a soon-to-be-released autobiography, and a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony by the Berlin Philharmonic. Everything about Ms. Tar expresses supreme confidence, accomplishment, and perhaps even genius. She seems in complete control of her life and her art.
Even at this early point in the film, it is difficult to imagine anyone but Cate Blanchett as Tar. Her regal bearing—which served her, and us, so well in The Lord of the Rings trilogy—transports Lydia Tar into an otherworldly realm. She seems not only larger than life, but also to be an almost otherworldly being.
After Tar lunches with Eliot Kaplan, an investment banker and benefactor to her Accordion Foundation for aspiring female conductors who is also (because of his connections) an assistant conductor, she goes to teach a master class at Juilliard Music School, where she confronts a BIPOC student about his assertion that J.S. Bach should not be taken seriously because he was a cisgender composer. Tar attacks the student’s judgement of Bach by modern cultural standards, encouraging him—in a caustically pedantic way—to concentrate on the music rather than the person, to—in short, divorce the person from the artist, which is, in one sense, a microcosm of this psychological study.
In another chilling scene, she confronts a young schoolgirl who has been teasing her adopted daughter and threatens her, in no uncertain terms, to hurt her if she doesn’t desist from torturing her daughter.
Tar the artist is a genius; her talent and accomplishments far outshine other, more pedestrian musicians, but Lydia Tar the person is manipulative, devious, shrewd, self-centered, and callous, a monster who uses people to further her career and satisfy her sexual needs. The viewer gets the first hint of her nastiness during the classroom scene, where she ultimately humiliates the student for his point-of-view. These abuses of power are not only informed by her genius but are enabled, and—possibly, in her view—necessitated by it.
When she begins rehearsals with the Philharmonic for Mahler’s Fifth, her passion for the piece as well as her leadership skills are on full display. She is in full control of the entire creative process, from conducting the symphony itself to overseeing every aspect of the live recording. She is respectful but demanding of her players, treating them as the gifted artists they are. However, when she notices (and is obviously attracted to) Olga Metkina, a young Russian cellist, she eventually helps the girl to secure a position in the orchestra.
Then Tar unaccountably begins to hear things. First, the noises that wake her in the middle of the night seem to be the electronic tweets and beeps that are ubiquitous in modern life. Then, as she is jogging one day, she hears a woman screaming, although no one else seems to notice. One night, she is awakened by her metronome ticking away inside a closet. How it got there is a mystery never fully explained. It is a crack in her façade.
As the film progresses, a series of events slowly peel away the layers of the conductor’s veneer. Krista Taylor, a former acolyte with whom it is implied Tar had a fling, and who was subsequently blackballed by Tar, commits suicide. It soon becomes apparent that Tar’s pattern had been to to use her clout to boost the musical careers of certain young women for her own sexual advantage. After Taylor’s death, Tar instructs her assistant Francesca, another acolyte with whom she had a fling, to cover up all correspondence between Krista and the conductor. Francesca is appalled and decides to take matters into her own hands, even as Lydia pursues the Philharmonic’s new Russian cellist.
From here, Tar’s personal life continue unraveling. Taylor’s family accuses Tar of being responsible for Kristen’s suicide and sues her. Francesca, whom Tar has circumvented for the assistant conductor position (after ruthlessly dismissing the current AC), blows the whistle on her old boss, sending the Philharmonic Board of Directors and Krista’s lawyers the revealing emails. Sharon, Tar’s wife and first-chair violinist, leaves her. That the cause of her demise is her personal life—that part completely divorced from her musical career, is an ironic counterpoint to her heated encounter with the Juilliard student, in which she insisted that Bach the artist had nothing to do with Bach the man while the student maintained that J.S. Bach be judged—and probably condemned—for himself as a person.
Caught in a downward spiral and plagued by scandal, Tar is dismissed from the Berlin Philharmonic nearly on the eve of the live recording of Mahler’s Fifth. The concluding movement to her ultimate demise is as inevitable as a musical resolution. Yet even when all is lost, Tar endures. She makes music. She is a creature that can do nothing else.
In an L.A. Times article, Greg Olsen draws parallels between Tar and elements of Stanley Kubrick’s films, even pointing out that Fields played the piano player in Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut. It is true that certain compositional elements, as well as the density of the narrative and the imagery, are very reminiscent of Kubrick’s work, particularly his later films.
From its odd and somewhat bewildering beginning to its slow and sometimes agonizing exfoliation of the emotional layers of a musical genius—and monster—Tar steadfastly and deliberately forces the audience to gaze at a woman whose personality is inextricably entwined with her genius. Her arrogance and narcissism stem from the regard shown her by fans, her acolytes, and the classical music community. Like royalty, she unthinkingly assumes she should get what she wants—and, as the Julliard student argues, that is a result of her culture, an assumption Tar refuses to acknowledge. In a sense, Lydia Tar is almost a tragic heroine, her flaw being her genius, a trait which simultaneously brings her to her greatest heights and blinds her to her own nastiest digressions.
Tar is a wonderful, complex, and eerie film, a comprehensive and evocative character study that resonates deeply into some of the basic assumptions which constitute our cultural spine. Cate Blanchett outdoes herself in her portrayal of Lydia Tar. As we see her lunching, socializing, negotiating, and rehearsing, the audience can tell she never stops pushing to further her career—and her art. Although the two ambitions are not in sync, Tar’s devotion to her music is her dominant—and probably only—redeeming feature. In every other facet, she is selfish, greedy, and manipulative.
Music is Tar’s passion, her reason for living. In the end, it becomes her prison—a symphony for one.