Tár

If you were a director wanting to do a film about the MeToo topics in the always emotionally charged, highly competitive, chronically precarious world of classical music, would it be about a powerful woman? IRL, all the classical music MeToo stories that came out have been about men. Unlike some other art sectors where women are now more represented in decision-making positions (or relatively dominant, cf. English language fiction publishing), classical world remains very asymmetrical – though women composers and conductors are now being programmed, hired and acclaimed more than ever in history. Todd Field gives this MeToo story to a woman and no woman is this powerful in classical music IRL: music director of the Berlin Phil who’s also a frequently performed composer, a book author with a PhD in ethno-musicology, an EGOT winner, a Lenny Bernstein protégée, plus the relatively more usual (head of a conducting institute for women; a visiting professor and an in-demand Master Class-er). All this is rattled off by the actual Adam Gopnik, playing himself on stage at the New Yorker Festival, where Lydia Tár has come to talk about her new book. So there are hints that this isn’t really a film about how things are and that there are fantastical elements in it. The script is also immediately clear that it’s not a film à clef about any existing woman conductor: Tár lists a bunch of them and gives them credit during the New Yorker interview as women who’ve made conducting a legitimate career path for women. “Marin Alsop, JoAnn Falletta… Laurence Equilbey, Nathalie Stutzmann”: it’s a film in which these women exist, but it’s not about them. It’s about a uniquely exceptional one among women and men in the profession.

You could argue, and Field probably would, that this isn’t chiefly a MeToo film, even though its MeToo turn completely takes over in the last third. Would anybody really make a film about the predicament of a James Levine or Placido Domingo or whoever else accused – or Harvey W for that matter? If you  give someone two hours of screen time, you give them sympathy. And Tár’s story is more complicated than those men’s; alongside some credible accusations, a secretly taken and tendentiously edited video clip from one of her master classes is released. While credibly accused of sexual impropriety and favouritism, she is also being set up – and there are anonymous online followers of her every move which do not get explained away by the end of the film. So perhaps this is a story of hubris, of a hero who came too close to the sun. Or a story of how power is actually agnostic about gender: once a certain mountain top is reached, everybody behaves in the same way, no matter their own history of oppression?

It’s also primarily a film about music, and having a career in the classical music field. I’m not sure if all the credit should go to Field, or to his consultant (a classical music consultant is mentioned in the closing credits), but dialogues are extremely spot on, some reaching the realm of pure insiderism. The lunches that she’s having with people sound like real life transcriptions by someone who knows exactly what gets said during those lunches; ditto for her conversations with staff, administrative and musical. One of the men she has lunch with is a professional acolyte who is begging her to give him her marked score of Mahler. Earlier in the film she explained to Gopnik and the NYC audiences that Mahler’s 5, especially the famous Adagietto, is actually more happy than we now tend to perform and conduct it, because it was created while Mahler was in the throes of love for Alma. Tár’s dynamics will be “love”, not “gravity”. To the acolyte at lunch, she says Do your own thing, and no idolatry. He, of course, when the accusations start pouring, will be the first to drop her.

Another lunch is with the previous music director of the Berlin Phil, an affable elderly figure with an upper class English accent who is, we learn in the course of the film, much less celebrated than Karajan. (Who isn’t, though?) She asks him later in the film if he ever had to deal with “accusations” to which he rushes to say no, and if somebody is going after him, “it’s too late now, they can’t have me now I’m too old and retired.” Which is followed by a melancholy comment about Jimmy Levine being pushed off the podium or something to that effect. It is a delightfully politically incorrect film until the last third.

The master class that Tar gives I think is worth the price of admission. “As a BIPOC pansexual, I have difficulty connecting with Bach and wasn’t he a misogynist anyway” says a young male conducting student at some point, which she uses as a way into a long excurse on why our own identity matters not one iota – hers as a lesbian included -- and that music is about transcending. “If you want to dance the masque, you must service the composer. You’ve got to sublimate yourself. Your ego and yes your identity.” The master class scene is extraordinary in that it reminds us, as we watch it, primed to cringe, what education isn’t any more: free exploration. No one teaches like that any more or they would be burned at the stake of social media – and the video does return to haunt her, but not verbatim (which IRL even verbatim would get someone cancelled) but edited to appear like she’s harassing the “BIPOC pansexual”.  

So this is what happens in the movie: an acclaimed conductor-composer returns after a book tour to her home in Berlin and to her concertmaster partner and their small daughter who adores her. There’s the usual orchestra administration stuff happening – an old, inherited from the previous artistic regime assistant conductor is a little long in the tooth and needs to be replaced, which is never a pleasant task. There are hints of Tár benefiting from having her partner in a key administrative position of the orchestra. There are auditions (behind the screen, of course) for a new cellist and (this is what happens sometimes between young musicians and older ones) a new player reignites something in the older, well established conductor. They meet for lunch, and then keep meeting in Tár’s work-apartment for rehearsals after the conductor decided that the second piece of the upcoming concert in addition to the Mahler 5 should be Elgar’s cello concerto, the young cellist’s favourite. Tár’s day-to-day work is unimaginable without her assistant, the very subdued and nimble young woman played by Noémie Merlant who tells her on one or two occasions about the terrible emails that she continues to receive from a woman that they both used to know. Information for the viewer is dropped in crumbs, until we learn that the young woman eventually commits suicide. Merlant breaks into tears while delivering the news to Tár, who comforts her and tells her that there is nothing that could have been done differently for her. It transpires that the woman was in some sort of either professional or sexual or an iffy combination thereof ménage à trois with the conductor and her assistant while attending the conducting institute. She was also, it appears, arbitrarily dropped, and we learn that Tár has been actively emailing various institutions recommending not to hire her.

The hints about the nature of this relationship are given in Lynchian flashbacks… but there are other Lynchian and horror-adjacent moments in the movie. Unexpected sounds, seemingly out of nowhere, appear in Tár’s family home and at the rental that she uses for work. A metronome starts ticking on its own late at night, and digital alarms for nonexistent things go off in the middle of the day. Once, after dropping the young cellist off after the rehearsal, she follows her into an abandoned ruin where the cellist can’t possibly be living, and where she gets terrified by the sounds of running animals (demons?). Running up the slippery stairs, she trips and falls. “I was attacked”, she says to the orchestra the next day when they wonder about her bruising. “It’s nothing. You should have seen the other guy.” On another occasion, frantic knocking interrupts Tár’s workday in the rental, and the neighbour, a haggard, confused woman, insists that she follow her into her apartment. There is a dying invalid on the floor that needs putting back onto her chair. The strong smell of putrefaction makes her rush home to scrub her skin.

Things get very dark very fast after the accusations start appearing. The young Russian cellist changes overnight (or stops pretending). The professional misconduct affair brings troubles at home too where Tár’s wife seems to have had enough and in a final fight describes their marriage as transactional. (There are earlier scenes in the film that belie this, however. Those we idolize hard we will bring down with perverse relish if they disappoint. No one likes their idolizing wasted.) The Mahler 5 performance and recoding is soon taken away from her, and we learn this in a shocking scene during the famous trumpet solo. Again, this is a film that knows its music, and how to marry classical music and film.

A couple of major things happen before the end, which I should probably not spoil. She doesn’t die in some Wagnerian conflagration, to Field's credit. But he doesn’t spare her total humiliation, and the brief appearance in the story of her indifferent and alienated family members adds further insults to the already considerable injuries.

How did this smart, serious and cruel film get 1) made, 2) Cineplex distribution? When I went to see it, it was screened at one of the biggest theatres in Varsity-Cineplex, and there were about 20 of us. It’s a miracle that large distributors picked this one up… and all probably down to Cate Blanchett’s star power. Blanchett is also one of the executive producers on the movie, and plays all of her piano and does all of the conducting in it herself. (Deutsche Grammophon is releasing the sound track as an album.)

I’ll finish by pondering one thing of which I too have been guilty in my writing sometimes: the film glamourizes and almost fetishizes the body of the conductor. (See my second book… or, even better, don’t.) There’s something iconoclastic-iconic about women on conducting podiums, dressed elegantly in suits which connote maleness – moving their arms in ways that connote wizardry. There’s a scene in the movie that indulges this sentiment, when Tár’s measurements are being taken for her new bespoke suit, her collars and cufflinks chosen, with several assistants about doing different jobs. And so is her Mahler 5 score fetishized, the one that contains her interpretive markings. In a scene following her on-stage interview at the New Yorker Festival, we cringe while watching a female fan talking to her at a reception, attempting to flirt. “May I text you?" she blurts out as Tár’s assistant takes her away. We cringe, in fact, in recognition and the film too puts itself and its viewers in the position of that fan. What if the sexual manipulator and the abuser of power is also an irresistible creative genius, a bold, free spirit in whose glow we want to bask? That is where the complexity and the discomfort of this film lies.