The big ticket this week is Tár the story of a conductor at the height of her career, played by an actor at the height of hers.
It’s Cate Blanchett, and many critics are saying this is her greatest performance ever. Considering her many awards – including seven Oscar nominations and two wins to date - this is saying something.
Photo: screenshot
Tár is written and directed by Todd Field – one of those faintly familiar names that you mix up with other movie Todds like Phillips, Solondz and Haynes.
Field wrote and directed a terrific film called In the Bedroom over 20 years ago, and I do remember him as an actor in films like Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking.
But this is his first movie on either side of the camera in 16 years.
There’s an assurance about the film that belies all those years away. Field knows precisely the story he wants to tell – and he opens by breaking the first commandment of a biopic – “show don’t tell”.
Tár’s first scene is a lengthy – a very lengthy – interview by real-life critic Adam Gopnik of fictitious conductor Lydia Tár, talking about her life and times.
Mind you, if it was good enough for Citizen Kane, it’s clearly good enough for Field.
We’ve already had some indication of how Lydia deals with her apparently pampered life.
She treats underlings like her long-suffering PA Francesca with disdain, and her focus – you might call it an obsession – on her vision, and getting her own way is clearly at the expense of everyone else.
Lydia has an important concert recording coming up, as well as a highly-anticipated book.
And there are politics at home too. Her wife Sharon – the wonderful Nina Hoss - is also the first violin of her orchestra – essentially her deputy conductor. Aside from their working relationship there are issues with the couple’s adopted daughter.
But that’s all backstory, in a way. Because Tár isn’t just about life among the privileged rich, or even the recent rise of top women conductors in a field previously dominated by men, though it touches on all these.
It’s about how someone with almost total control in her world handles it. A musician masters an instrument. A conductor masters an entire orchestra, often an entire audience as well.
In an early scene we see her leading a class for budding conductors, and cruelly dismissing the rather shallow opinions of one of her students.
But she doesn’t know – and we do – that now, almost everything she does is being watched, and often filmed, by the ever-present smart-phone.
Tár makes a point of playing with us. It opens with minutes of credits – the sort you’d normally walk out on at the end of the movie.
The cinema audience gets restless, then impatient. And suddenly we cut to a phone-shot of Lydia, with snide text messages about her.
Who’s filming her? Who are they sending it to? Lydia may think she’s in charge of her life, but technology is about to prove her wrong.
Another element of Lydia’s messy personal life is the unseen presence of a young former colleague – one that Lydia clearly encouraged for her own reasons, then dismissed when she’d had enough of her.
It comes as a shock that the power dynamic in the world of classical music is just as potentially poisonous as it is in Hollywood – or anywhere where absolute power can corrupt absolutely.
Does she think she can get away with anything because she’s Lydia Tár? Do art and morality have anything to do with each other? Who says your character has to be flawless before your music can be heard?
And how much of a shock is it when Lydia realises that today even the mere rumour of misbehaviour is grounds for cancellation?
Tár is undoubtedly a masterpiece – though for me, more so on reflection. The more I thought about the film, the more layers were discovered.
And that’s where star Blanchett lives. Just about every one of her award-winning roles – Queen Elizabeth I, Blue Jasmin, Carol and the rest - are prickly, self-absorbed, hard to love. But she makes us love them anyway.
Tár is that role in excelcis – and she’s matched all the way by Hoss as her wife Sharon. Half the film seems to be watching them watch each other. Which is why I think Hoss was robbed by the Oscars this year. Blanchett, I suspect, won’t be.
