TÁR (Todd Field, 2022)

I haven't seen a film in quite a long time that so bracingly invited me to think about it, one that I almost immediately wanted to read other writers' responses to. There are several reasons for this, some of them topical, of course. (And I agree that this is not a film about so-called cancel culture.) But it also struck me as a film that is willing to tackle serious, intellectual, adult problems, ones that exist at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. TÁR almost feels like a throwback to some earlier, less frivolous moment in popular culture, although truthfully I'd be hard-pressed to say exactly when such a moment existed.

But my strong response to TÁR is also personal. Although this is a film very much about the big money, high prestige world of classical music and its handful of generously funded urban symphony orchestras, it also resonated very strongly with my time in the rarefied corners of academia. There was a similar expectation of fealty disguised as apprenticeship, as well as a strange transubstantiation whereby the recognition of one's social marginality hardened into an elitist resentement. (If a movie like Real Genius played this for laughs, with a B-level doofus expecting a high-level appointment because he dutifully collected his advisor's dry cleaning, TÁR plays this as an internecine tragedy, one more honest about the often-unacknowledged sexual and sadomasochistic undertones these transactions so often disguise.)

TÁR also spoke to me because it is ultimately rather forthright about the cultural and intellectual aspirations of Americans, especially those of us from the working classes, as... not a masquerade, exactly, but a recognition of one's inevitable alienation from one's family and milieu and the conscious decision to forge ahead with it. We eventually learn that Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) grew up as Linda Tarr, a lower-middle-class accordion prodigy who nurtured herself on VHS dubs of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" on CBS. In essence, Linda reinvented herself as Lydia by using Bernstein's upper-middlebrow TV series as a lifeline, with which to eventually pull herself firmly into the upper echelons of high culture.

My academic advisor was someone whose icy, aristocratic bearing was somewhat legendary, and for those of us who knew this person, this persona was tinged with both admiration and irony, since it was almost entirely self-fashioned. They grew up in a small Florida town with a different name, and along the way this person accumulated both astonishing knowledge and regal bearing, all the better to put their origins in the rearview mirror. And I'm not that different, except perhaps that I tended to manage my discomfort in that environment, the sense that I did not really belong and never would, with self-deprecation instead of bravado.

To his great credit, writer-director Todd Field leaves out a lot of the hard evidence of Lydia Tár's wrongdoing, even though her actions and reactions speak very strongly to her guilt. Essentially, as a conductor, professor, and head of a grant foundation, Tár gave preferential treatment to young women she was attracted to, and possibly sleeping with. This boils over into a public crisis with the suicide of Krista Taylor (Sylvia Flote, mostly unseen), a former mentee of Tár's. In the recollection of Tár's current personal assistant / heir apparent Francesca (Noémie Merlant), she, Krista, and Lydia were all extremely close, even perhaps hinting at some sort of polyamorous arrangement. But like so much else in TÁR, the lurid details are never divulged and no objective truth is provided. What we do know is that Lydia actively sabotaged Krista's career, telling her cronies at various international symphonies that Krista was unstable and unemployable.

Was this in fact true? Tár's story, from which she never swerves, is that Krista had become a stalker and made inappropriate overtures. However, Lydia never told the authorities, her colleagues, or most damning of all, her own wife Sharon (Nina Hoss), who is also Lydia's concertmaster and closest professional confidante. Field is wise to simply leave us with the bad optics. Lydia's behavior strongly suggests that she had something to hide, and implores Francesca to delete all correspondence from Krista -- something she decides not to do. Instead, she turns this "evidence" over to lawyers when she is scorned. (Tár passes Francesca over for the assistant conductor position she has long expected, a decision Lydia makes, ironically, to avoid the bad optics of giving a professional favor to another of her "girls.")

As many have noted, TÁR is a much more compelling film when it is simply articulating the classical music milieu, letting its power dynamics and erotic undertones speak for themselves. When it becomes a how-the-mighty-fall procedural in the third act, there are only just so many places it can go. (Although to be fair, I did not see Thailand coming. More on that in a second.) What is both frustrating and exciting about TÁR is the way that it makes manifest a particular problem, one that is endemic to liberal-left institutions when they carve out spaces for "diversity." Lydia Tár overcame sexism to become a powerhouse, one of the key players in this small, elite world. 

But it seems that at least in part, she had to do so by mimicking the male prerogatives that come with such institutional power. She has a wife who occupies a supporting role, more involved in their parenting and less driven to international greatness. The opening scene, in which Adam Gopnik rattles off Tár's ridiculously broad resumé (she's even an EGOT), reminds us that, as a woman or a person of color, one must (as the saying goes) work twice as hard to get half as far. And it seems that, in molding herself to the authoritarian masculinist parameters of her field, Lydia came to embody the dodgy morality and entitlement that traditionally comes with that power. Whether she morphed into this person, or just found a world suited to her amoral narcissism, is an open question, but the name change implies that she started in one place and ended up in quite another.

As we know from the film She Said, which intelligent viewers are studiously avoiding, it would have been very easy for Todd Field to make a "#metoo" film, or a "cancel culture" film, if that were his intent. TÁR is something much more complicated. On the one hand, it is clearly about a manipulative woman receiving a long overdue comeuppance. But at the same time, it is an examination of the sacrifices and limitations involved in playing the game as you find it, of "acting like a man." That Lydia is a powerful queer woman -- in her own words, a "Uhaul lesbian" -- is hardly coincidental. By picking up the baton and taking the podium, she has essentially usurped a power that for centuries has been a phallic prerogative. The fact that she is (or may be) an older woman bedding her female subordinates is inappropriate, but it is also an intolerable claim of male privilege, one those around her are more than happy to punish. (And, when she is directed to a "massage parlor" brothel in Bangkok, she is forced to understand how others have seen her: patrician and predatory, someone above the rules of basic decency. It nauseates her.)

Much has been made of the scene of Tár's Juilliard seminar, when she is challenged by a self-identified "BIPOC pansexual" composition student (Zethphan Smith-Gneist) regarding the relevance of Bach and other old dead white men of the canon. Partly folks are impressed that it's done in one shot, something I did not notice at first. And unlike most such show-offy sequences, this one is thematically relevant, since the scene reappears as a dishonestly edited hatchet job. Those who are hopped up on the tyranny of cancel culture perceive Lydia as the hero here, since she puts the Gen-Z kid in their place, mocking their "obsession" with identity over capital-A art. But part of what makes TÁR such an exceptional piece of cinema is the fact that Field constructs this conflict without reducing either party's position to caricature. 

Instead, we are seeing something along the lines of what rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke called "argumentative stasis," the point at which two parties can no longer meaningfully discuss a matter because they share no common ethos. For Lydia Tár, breaking into this patriarchal realm, of conductors and composers past and present, meant channeling and embodying their habitus, their values, and making them her own. For the young student, there remains a possibility that the world of music could be remade by his generation, turned into something more inclusive and less hierarchical. She sees them as naive; they see her as an agent of entrenched power.

They are both right, of course. No one ever became a meaningful artist by pretending you could jettison history and tradition. It has to be reinflected and forcefully evolved. But there is always the possibility that your own commitments will be eroded by the institutional imperatives you once hoped to overthrow. After all, when they give you the keys to the club, it's hard not to explore every last room.