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DVD review: Tár [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-18
Maybe Tár is supposed to demonstrate that women in positions of authority are just as susceptible to abusing their power as men. Or maybe Cate Blanchett, who has played queens and goddesses, wanted to show off her musical skills and be an Oscar contender with one movie, the Whiplash of classical music?
I remember being befuddled as to what this movie’s even about. I thought maybe it was an international heist film, or maybe a spy thriller? It’s actually a psychological drama about a prestigious conductor who starts to unravel.
Tár is a movie Martin Prince might like. In a classic episode of The Simpsons, Bart’s pretentiously intelligent classmate goes to the same video game arcade as Bart, but improbably plays a video game based on the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre.
But at least the title “My Dinner with Andre” gives some idea as to what happens in the movie. Andre Gregory is the titular Andre, so presumably the other top-billed actor, Wallace Shawn, will have dinner with Andre.
What are we to make of Tár from the title? What is even a tár? Why does a single-syllable word need an accent? Well, there are legitimate grammatical reasons for that, though none of them actually apply here.
As with My Dinner with Andre, viewers like Martin Prince can play a sort of intellectual game of bingo withTár.
Hey, I know about Schopenhauer (mentioned im passim in both movies). Hey, I know about the ordeal Furtwängler went through with his denazification hearing (I read a Karajan biography, but mostly I watched the movie Taking Sides with Harvey Keitel and Stellan Skarsgård). A few more name drops like that and I might fill up my bingo card.
Besides the intellectual bingo, what is there to Tár? Normally with these reviews, I give a fairly detailed account of the first act, and try to avoid saying anything of what happens in the third act.
But with Tár, to help you decide if you even want to watch it, or to help you make sense of it if you have already seen it, we have to discuss the ending. So if you haven’t seen this movie yet and don’t want spoilers, please stop reading and come back to this later.
The first act clearly establishes that Lydia Tár (Blanchett) is a prestigious, world-class orchestra conductor, Kapellmeisterin of the Berliner Philharmoniker, and teacher of a master class at Juilliard. Tár is a fictional character, but it’s understandable to be confused on this point early on. There’s even a Wikipedia page, for what that’s worth.
Gustav Mahler, author of ten numbered symphonies, considered himself thrice homeless: a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, a Jew throughout the world.
Tár has been working very hard to prepare for a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which will be the crowning glory of a Mahler cycle that already includes at least two symphonies with large choirs.
In the master class at Juilliard, her student today is Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who describes himself as “BIPOC pangender,” almost as if just to dare Tár to be politically incorrect. Max doesn’t much care for the music of Bach (young Bernstein didn’t either), leading Tár to a rant exalting the great white male dead “Austro-German church-going” composers.
Never mind that Mahler, now a mark of a conductor’s prestige, saw himself as a thrice homeless Jew, and that his music was labeled as “degenerate” by the Reichsmusikkammer.
Max leaves the class in a huff. It’s his loss, as Tár will still have her position. Except that in the second act, things start to unravel for her, and the specter of accountability looms closer. Like too many male conductors in real life, Tár has been taking advantage of her position to sexually abuse musically gifted young women, one of whom commits suicide.
In the third act, Tár starts seeing the consequences of her casual disregard for other people’s boundaries and feelings, and she becomes a victim of “cancel culture.” This culminates with her physically attacking the substitute conductor for the big Mahler concert, yelling “It’s my score” as she punches and kicks the surprised man.
To be fair to the monstress, it is her score. Most of a conductor’s work is done in study and in rehearsal, and we clearly see that the substitute conductor is using at least one of Tár’s ideas for the performance.
Some viewers are confused about what happens next, and the theory has been proposed that Tár, now insane, is hallucinating her trip to Asia and her humiliating gig conducting a concert of video game music. I disagree with that theory, I think those events are as real in the narrative as everything else in the movie before that.
Now, I doubt Mahler himself would regard video game music with the same disdain as Tár screenwriter Todd Field seems to think we should regard it. Like a police detective getting reassigned to parking enforcement.
Or kind of like how in The Adjustment Bureau the fate of teaching children to dance for Emily Blunt’s character is presented as the wrong fate, a major step down after her promising career as a famous ballet dancer is ruined due to an injury. Who’s to say that ballet teacher is not also in that character’s “right” fate?
I have attended video game music concerts and I don’t feel any need to explain my attendance, though I do feel the need to explain that I wasn’t in costume. In fact, not many people were, I’ve seen more people in costume at a Star Wars concert. Though it could also be that given my ignorance of the Final Fantasy video games, I failed to recognize some of the costumes as such.
The conductors in those concerts all strike me as men with deep respect for the musical material, who don’t feel their conducting duties to be punishment for a public lapse in professionalism at a more prestigious concert.
Much more important than the insult to video game music concerts, is the defamation of Marin Alsop, who is actually mentioned by name in the movie.
Alsop, just recently named director of the Narodowa Orkiestra Symfoniczna Polskiego Radia w Katowicach, is an American conductor of Austrian ancestry, a protégé of Leonard Bernstein who is married to a woman musician. How can she not take Tár as a personal insult?
It’s okay to slander Antonio Salieri directly in a movie that plays fast and loose with history, since he died almost two centuries ago and there’s no family left with standing to sue for defamation, but it’s not okay to slander a musician living today by name. But it’s not okay to slander a musician living today with such a thinly veiled fictional version either.
To be clear, the movie Tár is the only reason I’ve ever had to run a Google search connecting Alsop to sexual abuse allegations. This article by Darel Jevens in the Chicago Sun-Times was the first result of that search.
“To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking,” Alsop told The Sunday Times. “I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it’s not really about women conductors, is it? It’s about women as leaders in our society. People ask, ‘Can we trust them? Can they function in that role?’ It’s the same questions whether it’s about a CEO or an NBA coach or the head of a police department.” She alluded to sexual misconduct claims against some of classical music’s most prominent male conductors, including James Levine [mentioned im passim in Tár] and Charles Dutoit.
Field has said the movie’s about power, not about women conductors in particular. Right. And Amadeus is about jealousy, not about slandering Antonio Salieri, a sinner to be sure, but not for the sins shown in that movie.
This reminds me of some of the things said about Hillary Clinton in 2016. As president, she would supposedly dole out pardons for cash, sell our nuclear secrets to our enemies, seriously consider pardoning herself and be all-around way too emotional. We dodged a bullet, like Jay Leno would say.
On the other hand, women actors like Blanchett want the opportunity to play multi-dimensional villains just like men.
★☆☆☆☆ I’d give the DVD another star if it had included some kind of behind the scenes featurette. Let’s not forget that Blanchett actually learned German and conducting for this movie. That’s actually her conducting the orchestra in a short but by no means easy excerpt from Mahler’s Fifth.
It’s the kind of detail that should be in a featurette accompanying this movie. Along with an apology to Marin Alsop.
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https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/18/2181100/-DVD-review-T-r
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