Although Tár doesn't get released in Thailand until February, you can watch it on amazon prime for $25 (for that you can own your own copy and watch it offline.) There is no way for me to review this film objectively - or without spoilers - so I will talk about it here and if you want to wait until you see the film to read these comments, please look away right now.
******* MULTIPLE SPOILER ALERT ********
So, I did not get to see the film until yesterday (thanks to Amazon prime who charged me $25). But, I got an inkling when Paul Spurrier returned from the AFM.
He said to me: "So we have here a mad genius conductor, who is kicked out of a major European orchestra after an act of violence, has rather ambiguous dealings with some young prodigies, ends up in Southeast Asia conducting a youth orchestra in a tawdry venue ..."
"Oh!" I said. "You went to a screening of our film?" Because Paul was telling me the exact plot of our own film. "The Maestro: A Symphony of Terror."
"Actually, no," he said. "I just saw TÁR."
Yesterday, I too, saw TÁR. And actually, Paul was not incorrect. In a sense, it does have the same plot as "The Maestro." But alas, I am a poor substitute for the incomparable Cate Blanchett, and our film is wholly different in substance anyway, being a modest little tribute to the horror films of the 1980s. Plus, the fall of the mighty, from Prometheus to the present, is in its very nature the essence of all that we mean by the word tragedy.
I cannot of course write an unbiased review of TÁR because I'm credited as a consultant up front (though my work, such as it is, only graces a few minutes of this 158 minute film) and also because my orchestra, every single one of them credited by name, appears for a few minutes as well.
However, this is one of the only films ever made that credibly inhabits my world, the real world behind the scenes of classical music, and which references hundreds of little things that only truly make sense to people who live in that world. One of the questions I was always asking myself throughout this film was, "Would anyone get this?" Occasionally it was the opposite: "Why would these characters explain something just to the audience in an expository lump, that everyone in the field would already know?" It's a balancing act which to me, succeeds pretty well, on the whole. I think though that for Blanchett's character to have to be told, for instance, something as well-known to conductors as the story of Furtwängler's denazification struggles (there was even a movie about that!) doesn't ring true. I also don't buy everyone talking of Mahler 5 as Mahler's "big one". I mean, in terms of size, there's 2 and 8, in terms of "what is his greatest symphony" most people I know would probably say 6, or 9, were the "big ones" ... 5 is a "big one" the way Beethoven's 5 is a "big one" ... it is just too "popular" to feel that way to practicing musicians. I'd say that this characterization of No. 5 is at best debatable unless you were first turned on to Mahler by the Visconti movie (which she does make fun of in the course of the movie.)
The film also contains the popular Hollywood myth that composers sit at the piano and try out a few notes and say "ah, that's it" and jot it down. That might be true in the pop world, I don't know. I, and every composer I know, writes music in their head and jots it down (or enters it into their software) ... but alas, that's not very visual.
A very interesting question is — how is Cate Blanchett's conducting? It looks very good. It's flamboyantly cinematic. The kids said that they had a spot of trouble because she seemed to be conducting in 7/4 instead of 6/4, but when I watched the movie she didn't seem to be getting it wrong. However, I do understand why they might have thought so. Blanchett's upbeats are not fully realized, like a golfer who hits the ball perfectly without doing the perfect swing beforehand. But this is also true of many famous conductors. That's because orchestras that are as good as the Berlin Phil don't need that much warning. They can play the piece anyway. All the work is in the rehearsal (as the character herself says.). Those dramatic gestures, in a sense, are for the audience — guiding them through the unfolding adventure. It's actually only a problem with a more inexperienced orchestra. So I'd say top marks on conducting the music, and a bit of nitpicking on how she conducts the silence just before the music sounds.
The critics have picked out the amazing scene where Tár bullies a Julliard student in a conducting workshop, and have read into it inklings of the hubris that leads to her downfall. First, this is a scene of staggering virtuosity ... quarter of an hour or so in one take, the camerawork (steadicam?) as seamless as Blanchett's flawless, nuanced reading of every complex line in the scene. This has got to be one of the most technically astonishing monologues in all of cinema. But most critics have focused on the fact that Tár mercilessly takes apart the poor little conducting student who's only trying to cancel Bach for being a straight white protestant. Because they haven't been through the fiery baptism of what it takes to become a conductor, they often miss that what Tár tells the kid are some of the deepest truths about why we do music. Conductors do it all ... persuading, cajoling, insisting, and in the end bullying ... if that's what it takes ... and if the kid can't take it, he's not cut out for it. It's a cruel profession. That monologue, truthfully, is full of things that I have said to my own students, though I'm usually not quite as mean about it. Sometimes, years later, I realize I should have been more mean. Truth is, I am the most mean to the students I care about the most. I guess you'd call it tough love. Lydia Tár, it seems, is a lot more promiscuous in her meanness than me.
The thing is, the TÁR character did the right thing. She may have belittled little Max, may have condescended in her tone, but the substance of what she said did not talk down to him at all.
Much is also made of the ending of the film — where my orchestra appears, as it happens. Because it is read, by most critics I have seen, as the bathetic nadir of Tár's existence ... of the karma coming to roost.
Yes, I personally believe that Mahler (and Bach, of course) exist on a higher plane than "Monster Hunter." I did not know this music. But let me tell you, the kids in our orchestra were familiar with the score. My resident conductor, Trisdee, who is in his thirties, and who is a world expert in early music performance practice, has played this video game all the way to the end. The hushed, religious intensity of the kids in weird costumes is as real as the fervour of the old folks listening to Brahms. I know for a fact that this gaming world is as rich and as real to those who are in it, as the nuances of romantic "sehnsucht" are to those who love "Tristan".
The reason I don't think Todd Field intends this to be purely a fall from grace is that Tár is never shown denigrating or despising this music at all. She's seen studying it seriously, and when she conducts it, she gives it as much her all as in her illustrious Berlin career. Indeed, she subsumes herself ... exactly as she taught little Max he had to do in the Julliard scene.
And we all know there's more money in video game music than in playing Mahler symphonies ... that's just the real world.
I think that we are expected to see this as the classic tragedy — a great figure whose hubris leads to death (career death at least). But the director has pulled a fast one. It's not a tragedy at all. The tragedy is just the top stratum of this multilayered work.
And the clearest foreshadowing of this is in the "apocalypse now" reference ... the crocodiles in the river who were imported to "be in a Marlon Brando movie" and stayed. As the boy from the orchestra says, "They survive."
Crocodiles are predators. In our story, Lydia Tár comes to be viewed as a predator. She's done a lot bad things, sure. Like the crocodiles, she eats people alive. But like the crocodiles in the river, she's still there at the end. Every indication is that she's going to climb her way all the way back again. Before her departure for the old "unnamed Asian country" we learn that she's already reinvented herself once before, dropping her decidedly "white trash" past for the exotic mystique of the name with the funny accent. I am not at all sure that she won't have the last laugh in this story.
The joke is on me, too, because when Living Films, the Chiengmai-based production company tapped me to consult on getting a youth orchestra in Thailand, they didn't tell me much. The only parts of the script I ever saw were a few sides that some of the young musicians needed for their audition. At first, I thought it was going to be a "white saviour" movie ... about some do-gooder musician who brings us benighted Asians to enlightenment through the power of music, or whatever. It turned out to be a movie that really asks questions about the nature of creativity. And whether geniuses can be "bad people" — and whether this matters in the context of their genius and of history.
In a real sense, this could actually be read as a "brown saviour" movie. Arrogant white genius gets canceled by bad acts ... and finds salvation in Asia, because we don't (yet) HAVE cancel culture here. Yes, you can just as easily read this as being about the first steps toward redemption as a film about an artist self-destructing.
I could say a lot more, and will at some stage, because there is a lot of substance to talk about.