Tár Baby

Is this Rorschach of a movie convincing in its ambiguities? I didn't think so.

I saw Tár this weekend. I found its ambiguities unpersuasive. That’s an unusual problem but then it’s an unusual film, a portrait of the artist as cartoon genius undone by cartoon abuse of power with all certainties removed to create the illusion of depth.

The extreme end of the film's ambiguities is the uncertainty about how much of what you're seeing is actually happening, given the evidence that Lydia is imagining things: strange noises in the night, a missing conductor's score, hieroglyphs on her metronome, an apartment building that’s really just a ruin. Or are these merely evidence of Lydia's heightened sensitivity to reality, especially sound, and are we meant to think this sensitivity is the essence of her genius? (Except the missing conductor's score doesn't fit that construct. She could just be an absent-minded professor, but that runs counter to Lydia’s hypercompetence, which, incidentally, is one of the more cartoonish aspects of her character; creative geniuses are very seldom hypercompetent, especially when they're successful enough to delegate practical aspects of their lives to someone else .)

Admirers of the film don't mention the is-she-going-mad subplot because it's the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. The movie could be about anything. It could be about Adam Gopnik eating magic mushrooms before he goes to see Marin Alsop guest-conduct Mahler's 5th in David Geffen Hall.

I'm curious to hear from classical music aficionados about whether the film gets the classical music world right, as it very much tries to convey. The pedant in me wishes to point out that Lydia Tár, or Linda Tarr, as she’s identified late in the film in a heavy-footed homage to The Great Gatsby, would be too young ever to have been a protege of Leonard Bernstein, who died of emphysema 32 years ago. Child-prodigy conductors are not, as far as I know, a thing. And Lydia/Linda certainly wouldn't have any memories to revisit of Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, which ended in 1972, when (to risk conflating actress with character) Cate Blanchett was only 3 years old. Also, Lydia wouldn't have a homemade videocassette of the one we see a black and white clip from, because VHS and its predecessor, Betamax, wouldn't have existed in 1972; the first Betamax was produced in 1975.

I didn't find the film misogynistic but my wife did and it's a very defensible position. I'm surprised we haven't seen any discussion of that.