Counter-Currents
1,354 words
Todd Field’s Tár is the story of the rise — or perhaps I should say “social climb” — and fall of Lydia Tár, a pioneering ethnomusicologist, conductor, and the first female Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic, who is brilliantly played by Cate Blanchett. Shot on location in New York and Berlin, Tár very effectively conjures up the world of contemporary classical music, from the concert halls and conservatories to the journalistic latrine flies.
In fact, from the very start Tár created such a feeling of verisimilitude that I found myself wondering if Lydia Tár is actually a real person. I know the world of classical music quite well, but the cultural establishment fabricates historic “first” female such-and-suches faster than I can keep up with them. So there was a moment of real doubt.
I think this impression was reinforced by the probably intentional resemblance of the name Lydia Tár to Lívia Rév, a Hungarian classical pianist. Rév was not particularly well-known, but the fact that she lived 101 years and made a number of recordings which remain in print means that her name has at least seeped into the subconscious of most classical music fans. (Tár is actually a Hungarian word. As a noun it means “repository,” e.g., könyvtár means “library” and ruhatár means “cloakroom.” As a verb, it means “to reveal.” The name is apt, for it turns out that Lydia Tár is full of secrets, which are revealed in the course of the movie.)
Another character, Eliot Kaplan, is a New York money man and amateur conductor who pays orchestras to allow him to conduct Mahler. He is obviously based on Gilbert Kaplan, a New York money man, Mahler enthusiast, and amateur conductor who used his wealth to record Mahler’s second symphony twice and perform it more than 100 times around the world. Probably the only thing that saved Field from a lawsuit is the fact that Gilbert Kaplan died in 2016.
The movie opens with Lydia Tár at the top of her game being interviewed by Adam Gopnick at The New Yorker Festival. The scene is mesmerizing. Tár certainly knows her audience, reminiscing about her mentor Leonard Bernstein, peppering her sentences with Hebrew, and talking about completing her Mahler symphony cycle. But there’s something contrarian and subversive about her from the start. Even as she praises Bernstein, she rejects his rampant subjectivism and claims that the purpose of a conductor is to keep time and perform the score as written and in conformity with the composer’s intentions. She also says that she hasn’t really experienced any “gender” discrimination in the world of classical music. (She puts verbal scare quotes around “gender.”)
The next scene, a lunch with Eliot Kaplan, is similarly languid and immersive, cluttered with shop talk but also filled with important exposition. For example, we first learn that Tár is a lesbian with a daughter. (She’s married to the Concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic and has adopted an off-white child.) But another subversive point is just tossed in: Tár doesn’t think the world needs yet another foundation for promoting women in classical music.
Director Todd Field certainly knows how to let a scene breathe. These are just a few of the sequences where the feeling of cinematic artifice simply melts away and one wonders “Is this real?” Unfortunately, one way that Field achieves this effect is allowing scenes to run on a bit long. After a few minutes, I found myself squirming, not of boredom but because I absolutely hated these people.
But I was hooked by the next scene: Tár’s masterclass at Julliard. She criticizes atonal modern music, and when a “BIPOC” “pangender person” named Max dismisses Bach because he was straight, white, and male, Tár gently but firmly tries to break him out of this mental prison. She’s really quite eloquent. Tár herself is a “U-Haul lesbian,” but she does not allow radical “gender” politics to poison her with resentment to the point that she can’t love Bach’s music. When she asks Max if all he wants to be remembered for is being BIPOC and pangender, he calls her a bitch and storms out. I wish more academics had the courage to defend the canon from this sort of mush.
I don’t want to spoil the plot, so I will say little more about the story than can be gathered from the promotional materials. Lydia Tár is accused of sexual harassment of younger female conductors and musicians. Tár isn’t without fault. For instance, she clearly plays favorites with a young Russian cellist with whom she becomes infatuated. But it becomes obvious that Tár’s accusers are ruthless, social-climbing sociopaths who have been stalking and gaslighting her. (Eliot Kaplan, her personal assistant Francesca, and Krista Taylor, a former conducting fellow who had some sort of affair with Francesca.) Tár could have handled them better, but she is not the villain here.
Tár’s critique of wokeness at Julliard was surreptitiously taped by a stalker and released in misleadingly edited form (something familiar to anyone who has had any interaction with the mainstream media). Tár is dropped by the Berlin Philharmonic, driven to a nervous breakdown, and her career hits bottom. The breakdown verges on parody, and the brutal conclusion is as crushingly unsubtle as a Tales from the Crypt comeuppance. But neither flaw is enough to sink the film. (The ending explains why the movie opens with the endless credits that usually roll at the end. It seemed pretentious and almost put me off the movie before it really started.)
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Part Four of the Trilogy here.
For me, the most fascinating sequence is when Tár returns to New York City to relaunch her career. We discover that she was born Linda Tarr to a lower-middle-class family in one of the outer boroughs. (Her first instrument appears to have been the accordion.) When she returns to her childhood room and begins watching her VHS tapes of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, Linda Tarr comes into focus, to me, as an overwhelmingly sympathetic character.
Like Tom Ripley in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (which also starred Cate Blanchett), the talented Miss Tarr is an intelligent, lower-middle-class, homosexual outsider with refined tastes who sets out to climb the social ladder. Everybody around her was born with a silver spoon, so she has to work extra hard.
Unlike Ripley, Linda Tarr isn’t an outright con-artist, but like everybody around her, she is calculating and conniving in constructing an image and a career. Thus Linda Tarr from the outer boroughs became Lydia Tár. Good Anglo-Saxon names have no cachet in the world of classical music, but something that smacks of Central Europe by way of Ellis Island is just the ticket.
But Tár has to work even harder, because her tastes, reverence for the canon, and ambitions as an artist are all basically conservative, and she has the courage not to hide them. She’s obviously achingly sincere about the things she holds dear. But in today’s world, sincerity must be accompanied by a bodyguard of irony, name-dropping, and intersectional posturing.
As ruthless as Tár can be, she’s no match for the people who try to bring her down. Unlike Tom Ripley, she doesn’t stoop to murder, but frankly I would have cheered if she had.
When, near the end of the film, Tár begins speaking about the intention of the composer she is about to rehearse, it is probably supposed to be brutally ironic. To me, it was moving. Tár has hit bottom, but her soul and her essential seriousness have remained intact. She will rise again.
In terms of its pacing, meticulousness, handling of interiors, and sheer intelligence — even in its failings — Tár kept bringing to mind Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut. Imagine my shock, then, when I learned that director Todd Field played the pianist Nick Nightingale in that very film.
The critical response to Tár has been overwhelmingly positive, but the most perceptive review is Richard Brody’s transparently dishonest hatchet-job in The New Yorker. Brody hates the film for being “regressive,” both ideologically and aesthetically, which to me are just reasons to love it. Brody is especially incensed that the film likens cancel culture to post-war German de-Nazification, which is entirely correct. Today’s “cultural Marxism” is simply de-Nazification applied to all white societies.
Tár is one of the best movies of 2022. I admire it for its intelligence, ambition, meticulous world-creation, superb acting, and dark and astonishingly brave depiction of the wokeness, cancel culture, and all-round viciousness of our cultural elites. Tár has only received limited theatrical release, so see it while you have the chance. If you blink and miss it, you’re in luck, because Tár is already available for streaming on Amazon, and it will be released in January of 2023 on disc.
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24 comments
Tar, often spelled Tarr, is also a Hungarian first name and surname. It means bald or clean-shaven in old Hungarian, and was the name of one of the clans that participated in the Hungarian Conquest, 895 AD.
Our most famous Tarr is the uncompromising film director Béla Tarr.
I know there is a village named Tar, but without the accent. Does the proper name version also have the accent?
No. It may have been added as an exotic touch. Like the umlaut in Häagen-Dazs.
I actually sat through Satantango once. It was either 9 or 11 hours.
Respect. It has been forever on my todo list.
Another candidate is Sándor Tar, writer of the working class, wrecked lives and alcoholism. He was noted for his artistic and personal authenticity: born into a poor family he lived most of his life as a simple factory worker, and became unemployed and starving after the dismantling of communist industry in the 1990s.
Finally at age 58, translated to German and French, he was invited to the Franfurt Book Fair and recognized as a major Eastern European writer of the 20th century — but at the same time back in Budapest an article was published accusing him of having been a government informer in the 1980s.
Initially he was forgiven by his friends and comrades on whom he’d reported because the authorities had blackmailed him with his homosexuality.
But as details of his activities became clear people turned against him. He went far beyond what was expected and did the reporting job with the same uncompromising commitment and flair that made him a great writer and sociographer.
Richard Brody is a windbag who hates everything that reminds him we gave away the society for nothing.
Every word he writes is dishonest, even “and” and “the.”
I had Kaplan’s Mahler recording on MCA, and recall it was pretty good. I also saw him conduct it at Carnegie Hall, and it was also pretty good. It was most memorable, however, for the moment at the end of the 1st movement development section, the big kaboom (those familiar with the work know whereof I speak) followed by a brief silence, when someone in the audience began to applaud wildly. An ingenuous listener, overcome with genuine enthusiasm on his first experience of classical music? An ironic comment on Maestro Kaplan holding the silence too long? Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that this might have been a “claque” paid to rev up the audience.
The MCA Resurrection recording was surprisingly good, and being combined with a great story accounted for it being the best-selling Mahler recording of all time. But I am pretty sure that Kaplan spread some money around to garner good reviews. When one hears most live performances, though, 99% of the applause is for the composer, not the conductor.
Thank you Mr. Lynch and welcome back! I haven’t seen this yet but from what I’ve seen(including the scene you described with the smug BIPOC student) it looks right up my alley.
I’ve been going through the archives lately reading past reviews of yours and I gotta say that your perspectives have made me reevaluate some of my favorites. As much as I love the early films of the Coen Brothers, Miller’s Crossing was never a favorite. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always liked it, but with such an amazing string of classics early in their career, one of them had to be at the bottom(one right above The Hudsucker Proxy). Your review made me go home that night and fall in love with it all over again, picking up things that went unnoticed before.
One quick recommendation. If you’ve never seen Juzo Itami’s Tampopo, do yourself a favor and give it a watch. It’s billed as the first Noodle Western, but I won’t spoil it any further. Criterion released it a few years back so it should still be fairly easy to find. It is one of the sweetest and funniest films I’ve ever seen with a very creative story structure, and it’s an amazing snapshot of Japanese food culture. I recommend it to every person I know that has the attention span to watch a film with subtitles. You won’t be disappointed.
Thanks for the kind words and the recommendation. I will look into it right now.
Miller’s Crossing is my favorite Coen flick too. No Country For Old Men is close but mostly because the book it was adapted from is a masterpiece.
It’s funny that some Italians like Turturro and Fauci have a distinctly Jewish look and feel. In other words, not just their appearance but their speech and general presentation.
I think the Turturro character, Bernie was bitter towards Tom was that he let him go only after he squirmed, in other words he wasn’t nice enough to free him right away. Scummy ingrate, and Mr. Lynch’s words ‘utter moral obscenity’ to describe this type of blackmail is spot on.
Another reason I love Miller’s Crossing is Carter Burwell’s score. I love playing the theme on YT, along with the mellow piano from True Grit.
Thanks for this review, will check out Tár for sure.
A movie I may watch.
Some time ago, I was a student a major American Conservatory. Then, the professors and maestros had guts. In my music history class once we were diving in to analyzing and discussing an opera when a male looking student who was always sad and angry and disgruntled raised her hand. She said, “Isn’t this just another patriarchical story where the gun represents the penis and … ” The professor responded, “(Students name)” then a pause and a sigh, “I like you. Now, this isn’t personal. Every year I get a question like this from a disgruntled feminist and question from a black student, when we have one, about the patriarchy and/or racism in Western Classical music. What I am about to say to you I say to all of you. This is music from its time and from its place. It isn’t sexist and it isn’t racist. So if you feel embittered and unhappy as a classical musician who plays, studies and writes music written by people you don’t like, then consider another pursuit. We are here to study the masters of music and study the world they lived in to make sense of the music. I am not going to entertain another question like this. Here is the reason why. I want to study and celebrate genius and so do the vast majority of the students here. Let’s ask serious question that help us understand and appreciate the genius of the musical masters whose music we interpret and play.”
It was a very polite takedown. She was clearly upset. But you know what, she got over it. She got over it because the other lesbians and gays and the rest of us loved him as a teacher and they agreed. If men would return to standing their ground in the academy and the conservatory we wouldn’t be suffering this kind of assault on our unimaginably rich culture and history.
I always really like his other film In The Bedroom.
This looks good. The wife will be stunned when I suggest we watch something together that came out in the last twenty years. Bonus!
Watch it for free here: https://ww1.streamm4u.ws/movies/tar-2022.yt986.html
Excellent review. I love literature and films, and literary and film criticism, but I could never write it myself (let alone the works under review). I seem to miss too many nuances. Worse, I tend to forget most of the films not long after watching them.
I saw Tar when it first came to a single screen moviehouse in my area in mid-October. Thinking back on it and my reactions at the time, I had some impressions similar to Lynch’s. I was basically rooting for Tar, in part out of simple racial identity, but also due to her fundamantal commitment to her art. Yes, she was a schemer (I thought that was an attempt by the director to “complexify” her, to avoid making her too sympathetic – an approach critics prefer, except wrt black characters), but that was done so she could reach the pinnacle necessary for her to be able to do something like directing a major production of Mahler in an admirable way – perhaps as a true patriot politician would have to mouth certain orthodoxies to reach a position of real power to be able to defy those orthodoxies.
OTOH, and I may be misremembering here, but wasn’t there an implication that Tar really had been something of a lesbian sexual harasser? She was undeniably a “Dona Juanita” (she was “married” to that blonde woman who seemed devoted to her, and they were jointly raising that “refugee”-looking little girl, but Tar clearly tried to ingratiate herself with the young Russian cellist, and this before her “wife” rebuffed her). I don’t understand Lynch’s take on that aspect. My memory is that the film implied that Tar had had an affair with a female musician under her direction; that underling had gotten too attached to her; Tar had broken off the relationship – and then had proceeded ruthlessly to blackball the poor younger woman (a character we never see, but only hear about) with other potential orchestral employers to the point that the girl finally kills herself. Tar is certainly depicted as selfish in her usual treatment of those around her.
Basically, my immediate interpretation of how the film meant the audience to understand its protagonist was that Tar was aesthetically and professionally honorable (ie, she tried to do her best in her work, and to do what was best for her orchestra, as when she replaced “Sebastian” {the older, Jewish-looking second conductor or whatever that position was}), but personally sleazy, and ruthless in putting herself (and, to be fair, her art) ahead of concern for others (not that many of those others were not also similarly ruthless in their own ways). I think Field wanted to create a morally complex character, and perhaps ‘failed’ insofar as the one he actually depicted ends up being essentially sympathetic as her artistic integrity outshines her personal viciousness.
I do agree that this was an excellent film, the best of the maybe 20 I’ve seen this year. It’s a genuine rarity these days – a film for adults.
The movie is quite ambiguous about Tar being a sexual harasser. She’s clearly interested in the young Russian, though. But on second viewing, there’s no evidence she did anything Weinstein-like. Her assistant Francesca, however, was clearly engaged in duplicitous and stalking behavior. She lied about deleting emails. She had Tar’s keys. So when Tar finds a metronome working in the middle of the night, which is a clear attempt to frighten her, or when her Mahler 5 score is missing, Francesca is clearly the culprit. Eliot Kaplan told Tar he offered Francesca money to look at her score, and after its disappearance, he is conducting from her score (or at least Tar accuses him of it). Francesca and Eliot are clearly in cahoots, therefore, in stalking, gaslighting, and ultimately trying to ruin Tar. There’s no evidence that Tar had anything improper with woman who commits suicide, Krista. She blackballed her for being “unstable” and “making demands,” and surely there’s some objective basis for this, since killing oneself is the sort of thing unstable people do.
That makes sense. As I said, some of the nuances may have escaped me (or I no longer remember them; my memory is, eg, confused in distinguishing the nighttime happenings, such as the metronome, from Tar’s dream sequences {at least, I seem to recall there were such sequences}). My memory of how I interpreted the film as I was watching it is that Tar had had a relationship with the never-shown “Krista”, and then got rid of her, perhaps indeed because of the latter’s instability or excessive neediness (that is, for justifiable reasons). If so, then the motive for her subsequent blackballing of Krista (giving bad recommendations to other orchestras to which she was applying for employment), and thus how we are meant to view the character of Tar, is similarly ambiguous. Was it done out of an overarching, “Prussianesque” artistic integrity (ie, Krista’s emotional instability really would be a liability to any orchestra, in which case Tar is being a hyper-conscientious and dutiful evaluator), or out of, if not exactly spite, then a concern for her own reputational self-preservation (ie, her status within her narrow professional world) that is selfishly disproportionate to the harm that her negative evaluations are doing to Krista, as someone who has presumably greatly labored in order to qualify for any orchestral position?
The film, I think, lends itself to either interpretation.
As for the assistant Francesca, I had a slightly different understanding of her character, too. I don’t think she was shown initially as seeking to ruin Tar; indeed, I thought she was infatuated with her (at least artistically and personally, and very possibly sexually). Weren’t there several instances onscreen depicting this mental state – of showing Francesca viewing Tar in an adorational way, or of seeking to spend more time with her (and being somewhat coldly rebuffed by her)? My impression had been that Francesca wanted to be ‘special’ to Tar, both as a person, and, more schemingly, as a favored apprentice or ‘second’. She wanted to hitch her personal and professional wagon to Tar’s star. Why did she keep the damning emails? I would say as a kind of emotional insurance policy, so she would have a future weapon to use against Tar should her attempt to become Tar’s ‘pet’ fail (as it eventually definitively did, when Tar did not choose her for … what was that position she clearly wanted for herself? “second-unit conductor” or something). IOWs, Francesca was seeing how far she could use Tar’s influence to propel herself, and when she reached the limit beyond which Tar was unwilling to carry her, and that limit was highly unsatisfactory, she turned on her.
Thinking back on it, this was indeed a fascinating film. I hope it wins some Oscars, both for Field and Blanchett, and that in doing so it returns to theaters come the Spring. I would very much like to see it again, more critically (and I don’t own a TV, nor do I enjoy watching movies on my computer, let alone phone).
The very beginning of the film is an unseen person (who must be Francesca, and later we see Francesca doing the same thing) texting someone — either Krista or Eliot, probably the former. The topic is Tar, who is being videoed as she sleeps on a private jet, and the tone is critical/sarcastic. So from the very start, the story is framed in terms of her being stalked.
I believe Krista is the redhead filmed from behind for a flash in the audience at The New Yorker Festival.
I may have missed the tone and/or significance of the early scene at the time of my viewing, but I don’t remember it now at all. I hope the film returns to the big screen after the Oscars.
Can we open our presents early and know if Trevor will be releasing any more guides to the movies in the future?
I am sure I will write enough for another volume after a few years of work.
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