Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is widely considered to be one of the top conductors in the world, currently leading the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra as the first female music director in the institution’s history.  As she begins her preparations for a live recording of Mahler’s 5^th Symphony, her obsession slowly takes over as she pushes away her wife and concertmaster, Sharon (Nina Hoss), as well as her personal assistant and heir-apparent to the coveted role of assistant conductor Francesca (Noémie Merlant).  In her rise to power and concurrent descent into madness continues, Lydia is haunted by the noise of her surroundings, cryptic nightmares, a past love, and her curiosity centered around Olga (Sophie Kauer), a young Russian cellist brought in to audition for the orchestra and a beguilingly new object of Lydia’s affection. 

Writer/Director Todd Field returns to the silver screen for the first time since his harrowing adult drama Little Children (2006) with Tár, a project built around Blancett’s participation that would not have seen the light of day had she rejected the script.  Premiering at Venice Film Festival before embarking on its Focus Features‘ backed release, Field places Blanchett at the center of a blistering examination of love and obsession, a 158-minute ordeal that, impressively, does not crumble under the weight of its tome of a script.  It is a dense story, but like a good symphony, Field introduces his themes and presents his variations before erupting into a crescendo. With cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, and despite the darkness and shadows, Field does not allow Blanchett a moment of privacy in this film which finds Lydia at the height of her career, and also at her most humbling lows. Blanchett, then, rises to the challenge to fully embody this larger-than-life character in, what early buzz is rightfully calling, a magnum opus performance of an already impressive resume. 

After the opening credits, Field begins his assault with three back-to-back-to-back punishingly long sequences.  This opening gambit makes it clear to audiences that if you are not willing to stay in one place for extended periods of time, it may be best to revisit Tár on another day as the film, much like its title character, is not willing to be met on anyone’s terms but its own.  The strange thing about these scenes is that they do not need to be this long, yet it never feels gratuitous.  When the credits do roll at the end, of the roughly 227,520 frames, not a single one feels like it could have been cut without greatly lessening the impact of the film.  

The first major scene is an extended interview with Lydia by Adam Gopnik, playing himself, that gets all the messy exposition out of the way.  Field is not trying to hide it here, it’s a simple yet effective tactic, that gets us informed of who this meteorically famous, yet entirely fictional, character is in the world of music.  This should-be structured glimpse into Lydia’s history and process reveals two key elements: 1 – she will always take control of the situation and 2 – in her mind, there should be no linguistic difference between male “maestros” and female “maestras,” a word that stings like a thorn every time Sebastian (Allan Corduner), her current assistant conductor, will refer to her as such. We understand in a few short exchanges that Lydia had to fight to be where she is today. Her success was not handed to her, she earned it, and now she plans to reap the rewards of her dedication and labor, and she will not stop until her name is carved into the annals of history in this male-dominated profession. From there, we break for lunch with Eliot (Mark Strong), the manager of the fellowship program which Lydia founded at Julliard to promote professional women conductors, and here the framework for the narrative begins to come into light as they discuss a host of topics, not the least of which is the preparations for Lydia’s crown jewel, the final Mahler symphony. This branch of the story will eventually play out like a political thriller as sidebar meetings with various board members are held to ensure that Lydia’s talent selections get the votes to be pushed through as she seeks to maintain control both at and off of the conductor’s podium.   

The third scene finds Lydia guest teaching a class where she is offering notes on Max’s (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist) music choice and style in an effort to push him to unlock his potential, but to those in the class, it feels more like she is tearing him down.  It plays out like a horror scene as Lydia rips into the student’s identity, sexuality, and political and social affiliations and does not let him off the hook until he finally breaks and leaves the class.  Is it excessive?  Yes.  Does it feel out of place?  No.  Is it uncomfortable?  Absolutely, and this is just the first of many scenes that will dare the audience to keep watching as Lydia pokes and pries at those around her.  To Max’s credit, Smith-Gneist’s performance deserves commendation for not crumbling under the pressure as soon as Blanchet begins to sink in her teeth, but he does not allow Lydia to see his tears. It is notable that she will see everyone she loves cry because of her words and actions at least once before the end of the film. Much attention has been, rightfully, shown to Blanchett’s ferocious performance, but the empathy brought to the screen by Hoss and Merlant can not go unrecognized. 

This tour de force opening is a perfect introduction to Lydia.  She is a dangerously seductive character, always flirting with the darker edge of things so that we never feel totally comfortable around her, but like everything and everyone around her, her energy consumes us. We are allured by her, and when we realize what has been done, it is too late. Her trap has been set.  We only have the benefit over the other characters in her orbit of being the omnipotent fly on the wall, just out of reach from her wrath but forced to bear witness to it all, and singed from the fallout of her eventual self-destruction.  

Fans of this narrative may want to place eyes on Marie Kreutzer’s The Ground Beneath My Feet (2019), a more corporate examination of a woman’s rise and fall in a high-demanding business environment and the effects that the drive to succeed at any cost can have on one’s mental well-being.  It is a little troubling that these films tend to end in tragedy. Despite the carrot of empowerment dangled by the logline, the narratives tend to complicate themselves in that they both suggest that lesbian relationships between two successful women are inherently transactional. Field, however, is not looking to really comment too heavily on this theme, and to be fair tales about obsession typically find their centerpiece – because “protagonist” seems too kind a word in this scenario – as rotten and toxic people who view others only for what they can provide. Gay or straight, male or female, these characters are black holes and their limitless approach to success is what makes them so captivating on screen, but playing these dangerous arcs is not easy. Without proper writing, direction, and command over the part, the actor in these roles will never be able to sell the performance, but thankfully none of that is a worry in Tár because Blanchett is at the top of her game, and that same elite level of execution is synergized throughout all of the various production departments. There are few films that capture and convey a director’s fully conceived vision, and fewer still that do it as effortlessly as Field and his team do in Tár. For example, every book in Lydia’s impressive study was surely placed with purpose by the set decorator, Ernestine Hipper, but those details grace the screen so naturally. Nothing seems out of place because nothing is out of place, yet these environments are still very much lived in and do not feel manicured or artificial.  

Not unlike a phantom that haunts an elaborate Victorian manor, there is a social menace at play here, unique from, but not dissimilar to, the one which stalks the characters of Fields’ previous work. The biggest difference here is that in Little Children the, for lack of a better word, scorn, which is levied against Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) is much more tangible than the ghost which haunts Lydia. This ghost’s origin is much more ambiguous; is it her pride, her guilt, her perfectionism, a byproduct of her process? It lives in the dark corners of the rooms, the mirrors, the daily sounds around town, her dreams at night, and the number 5, first in its disappearance and later in its re-emergence, stalking and taunting Lydia. This force accepts and rejects any and all reasoning throughout the film, a choice that adds so much texture to the already overwhelming experience, and while this open-endedness is sure to frustrate some audiences, it will captivate just as many the others in the auditorium. 

His film, which takes place in the esoteric world of classical music played for the ears of the elite, while certainly a work of prestige filmmaking never broaches the line into pretension. He manages this balance because he places the onus of judgment on the audience to levy their own verdict on Lydia, and this moral ambiguity opens the film up for further examination upon subsequent viewings. We have seen this character, thorns and all, but Field purposefully skirts around the legal jargon of her PR campaign to save face, or her abandonment of backers in the wake of numerous scandals from being all but name-dropped in a suicide letter by a former student, allegations of grooming her assistants, and a heavily edited viral video from her interaction with Max calling for her cancellation. Do not look to Field for answers as he is only highlighting these transgressions; he does not fully condemn them, and he is not endorsing them, either. Rather, he crafts Lydia to be the anti-hero in her own success story, and it is up to us as the audience to weigh her actions and determine for ourselves if the eventual punishment endured fits the crime.