‘Tár’ Review: Todd Field delivers a Kubrickian masterpiece
The fragile debate of art vs artist crops up just about any time a beloved creator commits a crime or falls out of favour with contemporary audiences. Can we freely enjoy the music of Kanye West, Morrissey and the like whilst acknowledging their sour personalities? Such is one of the many avenues of discussion in Todd Field’s complex drama Tár, a bewitching character study that obliterates the ego of a narcissistic protagonist.
Taking place in the Feng shui apartments and grand beige concert halls of Berlin, Field’s story follows the fictional pianist, ethnomusicologist and composer Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Stressed with self-made pressure, we are introduced to Tár while preparing for her live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, promoting her latest book Tár on Tár on the side.
Carefully curating her life as if she is a totem of higher creative importance who will one day be academically studied, Field takes much of the film’s first half to define Tár’s attentive routine. Often woken in the night by the slightest of ticks, her life abides by rhythm and control as she manipulates those around her to fit in with her tempo, tinkering and shaping them as if they were mere sounds in her orchestra.
This cunning personal and social manoeuvring that Tár executes makes Field’s ‘Best Picture’ nominee such a gripping experience, with the viewer’s opinion on the protagonist switching with each new scene. Blanchett’s title character is an enigma to be unlocked, with Field providing all the information you need to form an opinion on her without giving the critical pieces of evidence that would objectively define her morality.
Such forces you to sculpt your own impression of events abiding by your own political stance and opinion of the contemporary culture wars, with Tár aligning herself with the composers of the past, including Johann Sebastian Bach, who she berates a student not for liking due to the artist’s “misogynistic life”. Her words to the self-named BIPOC pangender student become the central conflict within her own career, as a recording of her tirade joins accusations of professional misconduct.
Field presents this personal tussle between the perception of oneself and the image one would like to project to the world with masterful control, creating a complex script that refuses to be defined by one single statement. Though Tár’s life seems rich with artistic value, it is also empty of emotion, with cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister flowing from moment to moment, often in a soft gloom, as if he’s navigating the mind of a lost, wandering soul.
In total authority of the film is Blanchett in the lead role, whose magnetising performance helps consolidate Tár as a composer and troubled artist, with many viewers believing Field’s film was a biopic. Strip away the almost superfluous comments on the culture wars, and beneath the layers is a compellingly fragile tale about a woman whose careful construction of her own image is slowly deconstructed by the ferocity of public opinion.
Though maybe the public hardship is something of a peculiar rite of passage for her to become the cliché tortured artist, stating that to seize truly inspired greatness: “You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself”. It is in the ambiguity of Todd Field’s Kubrickian masterpiece that the anxiety, intensity and peculiar joy of Tár festers.
