‘Tár’: the return of cinematic Expressionism
Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár in the film 'Tár', written and directed by Todd Field.
Tár opens with a lengthy sequence of artistic credits without any image. This is an indication that its writer and director, Todd Field, believes that a film, like an orchestral performance, is the work of many rather than a single great genius. This sets the tone for a narrative that follows the unravelling of a famous conductor: Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett). The film could be seen as a deconstruction of the genius myth, but it is also a nuanced, even equivocal, exploration of the uncompromising ruthlessness that drives sublime artistic expression.
Lydia Tár is a virtuoso pianist, composer and polyglot who is the current conductor at the Berlin Philharmonic. She has recorded all nine of Mahler’s symphonies apart from his Fifth, which she is poised to do and which will be the pinnacle of her career. Lydia describes Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as “a mystery” — and this film is indeed both a mystery and a haunting. Its cool and detached objectivity gradually gives way to an increasingly Expressionistic mode, reminiscent of the German silent cinema of the 1920s. As she begins to spiral out of control, we become aligned with Lydia’s visions and nightmares. (Spoiler alert.)
Lydia is being haunted by Krista Taylor, a former protégée who has, we discover, become suicidal. There have been accusations of a coercive sexual relationship between them, as well as evidence of Lydia blocking her career, witnessed by hastily deleted emails. Following the news that Krista has actually committed suicide, which appears to leave her shockingly unmoved, Lydia becomes acutely aware of intrusive sounds – a doorbell’s chime which she mimics on her piano, the night-time dinging of electrical appliances, neighbours’ doors pounded, a metronome’s click in a cupboard. In an earlier scene, Lydia’s former teacher says that Schopenhauer measured a man’s intelligence by his sensitivity to sound.
As in the masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), where the viewer sees reality through the jaundiced mind of a madman, we experience the disconcerting intensity of the sounds she hears and the sights she sees — or what she thinks she hears and sees. We even enter the fragmentary dreams of her mostly sleepless nights. In these apparitions of distorted faces and whispers in the dark, the repeating motif is of a young woman with red hair. This Expressionist mise-en-scène is intensified by the unnerving score of the film’s composer, Hildur Guðnadóttir.
The film takes a darker, stranger and more fantastical turn in a scene where Lydia follows a woman’s voice down into the flooded basement of a derelict Berlin building. In the gloom, we hear an ominous pattering and catch sight of a growling dog: the feeling of impending danger and terror is suddenly overwhelming. Here, the camera changes for the first time to shaky hand-held footage, the cinematography mirroring the fragile mental state of the protagonist. This switch of perspective even makes us question whether we can be sure of her vision any longer — that what we are seeing is really happening. The action thereafter descends into a vortex, as Lydia’s career and personality appear to disintegrate.
Blanchett’s performance is masterful and nuanced in its emotional range, embodying so many opposing and complex ways of being. Lydia is poised, proud, arrogant, controlling, even threatening, passionately eloquent about and deeply moved by music, but also humanly racked with nerves, tentative and vulnerable as she falls in love once more. When conducting Mahler the music seems to course through every nerve in her body. As her “mentor” Leonard Bernstein explains, “the most wonderful thing of all is that there’s no limit to the different kinds of feelings music can make you have, and some of those feelings are so special and so deep they can’t even be described in words.”
Tár takes on topical themes with #MeToo exploitation and cancel culture, but Field cleverly remains detached, leaving it up to the audience to form their own view. This is a film about the power of music as much as about power itself. The most thrilling moments are when we glimpse Lydia conducting. The performances of Elgar’s Cello Concerto by Lydia’s latest love-interest, played by the actress and musician Olga Metkina, feel like moments of purity and relief. Yet the manipulation whereby Lydia places her in a solo role, before she has even been officially welcomed into the orchestra, is a clear example of the domineering attitude that leads eventually to her downfall.
There is extraordinary pathos in her fall from grace. Lydia’s descent into a kind of madness is reminiscent of Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), where dream sequences taken with a mobile camera describe the misery and humiliation of a man despised by his peers. The ruffled appearance of the once pristine Lydia almost seems to echo the humiliations inflicted on the characters played by Emil Jannings in both The Last Laugh and Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930).
In the film’s final sequence, Lydia travels to an unnamed Asian country and the film takes on a strange, almost dream-like quality. In the final scene, we see her conducting an orchestra. It is only when the camera pans over the audience members, who are dressed in cosplay costumes and masks that we realise she is conducting music composed for a video game. The denouement is devastating, tragic and wonderful.
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