Minutely-controlled world

It might seem strange that after watching over two and a half hours of Cate Blanchett’s riveting performance as fictional composer and conductor Lydia Tár, I could turn to my friend and fellow-viewer and ask: ‘What was that film about?’

This wasn’t because Todd Field’s latest work was a confused film. In one sense Tár follows a familiar trope of a musical genius whose relentless pursuit of perfection leads to breakdown and a fall from grace.

I asked the question because one of the things I love about Todd Field’s previous two films, In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2006), is that he doesn’t bash you over the head with the meaning of the stories he tells, but instead invites you to think for yourself. As I have pondered what Tár is about, one phrase from the Gospels has kept entering my mind: ‘What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?’ (Mark 8:36)

God of her own world

Field’s film (nominated for five BAFTAs and six Oscars) starts with Adam Gopnik (playing himself) interviewing the maestro conductor at the prestigious New Yorker Festival. He begins by listing her accolades, which conclude with an election to become the first female principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. She is a woman right at the top of her profession, a fact which her assured answers to Gopnik’s questions only confirm. Yet, in a clue to the meaning that lies beneath, Field shows us Tár’s personal assistant mouthing the words to the questions that Gopnik asks and the answers Tár gives.

What we see as the story progresses, is that Tár’s world is minutely controlled and curated by Lydia Tár. She is a conductor whose orchestra must respond to her every movement. ‘They cannot start without me’, she tells Gopnik, ‘I start the clock. However, unlike a clock, sometimes my second hand stops, which means time stops.’ As we discover, it is not only the orchestra that Tár conducts but everyone and everything in her life. As her lesbian partner tells Tár, ‘Everyone in your life is instrumental to you.’ Everything is a performance with Lydia Tár at the centre. Her forthcoming autobiography is aptly titled Tár on Tár. She is god of her own world. Indeed, I have a strong suspicion that Cate Blanchett’s Tár is present in every single scene of Field’s film.

However, reality has a habit of catching up with us and, slowly, Tár’s carefully controlled world begins to unravel. Just as she is rehearsing Mahler’s 5th Symphony, emails begin to arrive from a disgruntled ex-student. ‘She’s not one of us’, Tár tells her assistant, and instructs her to ignore them. But when the student commits suicide, an investigation ensues, and further accusations of sexual exploitation of aspiring female conductors and musicians emerge. As her mind and life spiral out of control, a disgraced and cancelled Tár finds herself back in the bedroom of her distinctly uncultured childhood home in anonymous upstate New York. What follows I see as central to the meaning of the film.

Music as a doorway to feelings

Stripped of her success and reduced to plain Linda Tarr, her pre-fame identity, we see her bedroom cupboard full of videos of her childhood hero, conductor Leonard Bernstein, presenting his hugely popular Young People’s Concerts. Tár selects a tape and, as she must have done many times as a child, watches as Bernstein explains that the purpose of music is to feel things. ‘Feelings are so special’, Bernstein says, ‘and so deep, they can’t even be described in words.’ What we are given is a window into Tár’s childhood soul which was able, perhaps for the first time, to feel things through the gift of music. Like Bernstein, she may have started on a conducting career because she wanted to share that gift with others. Instead, what she had become was an unfeeling monster, achieving ever more fleeting moments of emotion despite her obsessive pursuit of musical perfection. For the first time in the film, I found myself feeling a deep sympathy for this broken woman. I wondered what the feelings were within her young soul, hidden so deep that she couldn’t find words to express. Feelings that she had exchanged for the whole world and that only now in her ruined state she was beginning to touch again. A clue may lie in Mahler’s 5th Symphony, that she had hitherto avoided recording but was rehearsing just as her world collapsed. As Tár tells Gopnik in the opening scene, it was not a piece that was born into ‘aching tragedy, but into young love’.

TÁR
Director Todd Field
In cinemas, cert. 15 

James Paul is director of the English branch of L’Abri Fellowship, a Christian study centre and community which provides people with the time and space to think through their questions about the truth and relevance of Christian faith. See www.englishlabri.org
He will be on sabbatical until later this year