I am divided. Using the classical music contemporary enclave as a backdrop, Todd Field delves into subject matters that are timeless and timely at once, striving for depth, complexity, and debate. Although prominently reflecting on the deceptive boundary between oeuvre and conduct of an artist, more intimate themes are implicitly tackled—the need of asserting a social position in a world of wolves, the strenuous fighting against inner phantoms, obsessions, insecurities, and the tragic acknowledgment of having aged. But whereas on the page Tár secretly smuggles under our skin an electric sense of unease, ambiguity, danger, as if the words we read could be a code for something else like the geometrical figures that torment its eponymous protagonist, on the screen it hardly nears the same brilliance. The beginning is exciting on both. Three long dialogue scenes follow one another almost back-to-back, highlighting the bravura of the writer and the performers—Cate Blanchett especially, no wonder, as always a spectacle in every movement, gesture, utterance, and gaze. ‘She’s almost like mercury rolling on a table,’ once said about her Sarah Paulson, using a beautiful analogy that particularly fits this performance. ‘It’s entirely elusive, and yet right there in front of you. And constantly moving and shape-shifting and . . . and something one would covet.’1 Her costumes are amazing too. Elegant, linear, practical, perfectly framing the image of a person who has the drive and discipline to face her own fragilities and fleet, if so must be, only to defend her right to carry on—do more, do better. And yet the film, the film as an experience that shakes and burns and in time grows, sadly struggles to keep the great intuitions at the core of the story together, resulting in the lukewarm combination of a cryptic ghost story and a duly hand-sanitised character exploration—the music, its unmistakable scent of wood, being almost left behind or rather, again, failing to have the cohesive presence it has in the written form.
On the screenplay, an introduction reads, ‘Based on this script’s page count, it would be reasonable to assume that the total running time for Tár will be well under two hours. However, this will not be a reasonable film.’ A good resolution, but a promise not entirely kept. Except maybe for the ending, by far the most intriguing moment, the one that will make me come back to it soon.
The lights dim in an auditorium populated by monsters. She gives the downbeat. A hyper-masculine voice drowns the music. ‘If any of you have lost your nerve, then step away now and let no one judge you.’
1.The Elusive Power of Cate Blanchett, Jordan Kisner (The New York Times, 11 October 2022).
