Tár - a film by Todd Field

Everyone seems to agree that Cate Blanchett is magnificent in Todd Field’s latest film, Tár. I’ll place on a limit on this - she doesn’t carry the film; it’s a taunt ensemble piece and here Field pulls off the first of many sleights of hand. It makes no more sense to see the film as a result of Blanchett’s acting than to believe a piece of music only exists because of the conductor. In Tár, I watched three tropes twist, weave and bind the narrative, and came out of the cinema both dazzled by a great piece of film making, and a bit bewildered by what the fuck so many critics or commentators thought they’d seen.

Firstly, this is a savage witty rendering of the classic music world. Field has talked about the privilege of seeing his script evolve and mature through his direction and then editing into something close to his vision. But Field shouldn’t in any way downplay how brilliant his writing and research is. The film shimmers with the same veracity that Byatt or Mantel bring to their work - the motivations, the processes and the milieu the characters inhabit is staggeringly well projected. 

The ambition, the loyalties or lack thereof, the sacrifice, appalling snobbery, the arcane knowledge and techniques, the lineage bestowed by mentors, the cultural value placed upon the repertoire by the inner ensemble and the outer chorus of characters, ascribed meanings of power gained by rubbing shoulders with the less than perfect geniuses who gift us these performances - it’s all there. If you think an orchestra is a place for gentle souls, you are very naive. If you think the power structures that fund and support its ongoing place in the cultural pantheon are in any way benign, you’re delusional.

And here’s another of Field’s sleights of hand. We’re all so focused on Lydia Tár, both as the maestro and the person (as constructed as she is - an actor playing an imposter playing a musician) that the very air, substance and place of that classical music world that makes her possible becomes invisible. Again as Field has commented, a conductor holds power at the apex of a very dysfunctional relational and power structure.

A lot of the anti-Tár indignation repeats the same mistakes we’ve made with the Weinsteins, Epsteins or Risdales of this world. We do not identify and demand change of the systems that allowed their abuses and crimes. As individuals they may be charged, lose power and influence and a place in the halls of posterity, but the facilitation of their behaviour is not addressed. The curtains are never pulled back to reveal the money or privilege that’s been gained from their work, or might be threatened by that revelation. 

The film looks this squarely in the face, literally. The film score album cover from DG as Exhibit 1.

Toward the end of the first act, Tár gives a master class at Juilliard. She’s a bloody awful teacher, but leaving that aside, there’s an encounter between Max, a young conducting student and Tár. This is the film’s second main thread - contestment of the cultural canon. This scene has been widely spoken about as an inter-generational cancel culture moment, with a lot of predictable lining up (though what Richard Brody brought to the party is just fucking weird).

The term cancel culture is a right-wing trope - it came from the firepit of some FoxNews troll and is usually muttered by a white usually male person of a certain age, furious that they have to finally take responsibility for whatever nonsense falls out of their mouth. Has that infuriated you? Let’s take that and work on it together. 

The cultural canon has been pretty stable for the last say 150 years. Sure the gatekeepers have let some newbies in - a few women writers who either match the mad woman in the attic or the witch or the whore trope, even a few women artists. In the world of classical music, its white maleness glows like the arse of a teenager mooning you from a passing 1988 Toyota Cressida.

And that too is a ridiculous simplification, especially as it ignores most of what most of us absorb as culture. But in classical music, if you want your increasingly aged subscribers to shuffle their zimmer frames through your concert hall doors, a large dose of the familiar pays the bills. Plus your large corporate donors may be able to hum few bars. Dah dah dah dah.

What we see as Max argues with Tár is a struggle over the canon. An argument Field has noted Tár comes to with enormous dishonesty. She struggles throughout the film to write an atonal composition, and in this scene she dismisses a piece by Anna Thorvaldsdottir that Max is working up. After claiming Thorvaldsdottir’s piece has no connection to place - bit rich coming from someone who is placeless - she asks about Bach, Max states he has little relevance for him, and she is both outraged and uncomprehending of his position. 

But she chooses to ignore something else about that canon she is so invested in. While its boundaries are reasonably fixed, its focus is not. Bach was terribly out of fashion in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly his orchestral works. She mentions Schweitzer’s rehabilitation of Bach’s works - and we come back around to paternalism, cultural hierarchies and an unexplored connection to her earlier ethnographic work, all while displaying an appalling at best insensitivity if not casual racism to Max. I keep thinking of Patricia Barber’s ‘WhiteWorld’.

What’s at stake is, who is allowed to dictate the boundaries of the canon? Who are the gatekeepers? They’re coming for you and you’re not even vaguely intellectually prepared for the debate. Cancel culture isn’t about taking away your toys, it’s in part asking you to validate why your tastes and opinions matter more than the most of the other peoples’ on the planet.

The third thread of this film is class. Let’s start with a few cliches. Middle class children learn an instrument for at least a few years during childhood, working class children at best might have access to community theatre. Or a screening during Grade 3 of  an ABC TV concert of Carnival of the Animals. Middle class children are taken to see a live performance. Middle class teenage girls know who is Jacqueline du Pre is, their working class counterparts, Kim Kardashian. 

The film is largely set in Berlin, the North Star of classical performers, performance and institutions. Oh the Americans might have Carnegie Hall, the LA Phil, the NY Phil, even Philip Glass, or the Brits that odd tradition of the Proms, but Berlin is where it’s at baby. The film’s sheer audacity of perching even a fictional woman as the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic has led to a lot of pursed lips I’d bet. 

But Tár in the opening scene is keen to hide one key thing about herself from grinding public attention. She may be out as a lesbian, she may be open about her marriage to the orchestra’s concertmaster, she may be relentless in her ambition for her performances, but she is not telling anyone the charming story of her humble origins from a clapboard in what looks like New Jersey. 

Instead there’s a lie about Bernstein as her mentor which again as Field has noted wasn’t possible given her age and his death in 1990. In the middle or upper class world that manufactures each generation’s new orchestra fodder, mentor is teacher, the hand up, the opener of doors, the whispered provider of Opportunity. Bernstein was instead for Lydia a David Attenborough as he was for millions of culturally excluded Americans, a guide through a world of inaccessible treasure and carefully curated cultural aspiration. 

There are many moments of thoughtful examination of Tár performing herself into existence. The tailoring session, then her travelling costumes which are more gangsta than maestro including the NY Mets cap. The boorish car which is a wheeled cross between Helmut Kohl and Elon Musk. And the colour of her hair. Not Euro chic but Ivy League blonde. 

Tár reminds us that if you play the game, pretend you’re middle or upper class, are lucky enough to be white, you can enjoy the game even dragging the liabilities of being queer. But if you transgress, you will be cast out. Tár has no connections in this Berlin of lineage, history, privilege. Her only ally is her predecessor who is forgotten by the orchestra board, and he, like her wife, will abandon her when she becomes too much of a liability following her clumsy coarse hubristic use of power and privilege. 

Tár, when we glimpse her origin story, had no exposure or training on how to successfully misuse power when it came to her. She could surround herself with the props of culture, she could bring to her work an understanding of conducting that was transcendent - the placing of the horn player in the Mahler is brilliant - but she could not stay behind the curtain. She failed to escape scrutiny. 

She could have, like millions of other people in places of power, used and discarded Krista Taylor without consequence, but she overplayed her reach, damaged someone with better connections, misread her grasp on power and her right to a place in the canon. 

For me the interesting question is, would Lydia Tár have been cast out had she been male, straight and middle or upper class? I suspect not. There’s always someone with too much to lose.