“I am Petra’s father…I am going to get you.” Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett)
Make no mistake, Tar is not about music: It is a fiction about naked power in the rarefied world of classical music conducting. As writer director Todd Field deftly orchestrates a drama that’s almost a thriller about the first female conductor, Lydia Tar, in a major German orchestra, the audience is thrilled and mesmerized as if Leonard Bernstein (her mentor) were conducting Mahler in Lincoln Center.
Cate Blanchett brilliantly becomes Tar, a world-renowned conductor, who has had stints from Cleveland to New York and finally Berlin. Blanchett is great enough to make the audience feel as if they had been intimate roommates with the maestro.
No longer having to answer questions about gender, she commands like a dictator from choosing orchestral leaders to changing a program to feature a potential lover soloing Elgar on a decidedly-different program dedicated to Mahler.
When she dresses down a student at her Julliard lecture, she also handily deconstructs Bach’s Prelude in C Major. She reveals in one incident her shredding personal side and her transcendent understanding of classical music.
As the quote above displays, even in her personal life she exercises an outsized fearsomeness. She can dispatch her daughter’s (Mila Bogojevic) bully with a force equivalent to conducting Mahler’s Fifth (or “the five” as Lydia comfortably refers to it).
When she asks permission from the orchestra to mount the Elgar, she is actually telling them that’s what the program will be, at the same time informing them she’s had to rotate out a beloved long-time player. Everyone is aware of the politics, especially her lust for a new cellist specializing in Elgar’s Cello Concerto, replacing her assistant, Francesca (Noemie Merlant), who has seniority and maybe better skills. Yet Field, clearly schooled in Greek tragedy, loads the screenplay with hubris, the poison of numerous power players over the centuries.
It's the conductor’s old game in new times when social media will reveal peccadillos as well as crimes, real or figurative, and autocrats like James Levine and Lydia Tar cannot withstand the scrutiny.
Because we have lived through all kinds of strong-man rule, from democracy-endangering fascism to indiscriminate pandemic, unfettered power seems eventually doomed to the moral demands of a populace chafing at the abuse of leadership for its personal gain, be it wealth or lust. It just takes a while for Nemesis to arrive.
Tar may be the best film so far of 2022 and Blanchett the best actress. Start your Oscar adventure now in theaters with Tar.
Tar
Director: Todd Field (In the Bedroom)
Screenplay: (Field)
Cast: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)
Run Time: 2h 38m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
