https://www.commonsense.news/p/a-movie-for-the-post-metoo-moment
Todd Field’s new, immensely ambitious film Tár begins with a neat trick: it puts the credits at the beginning. Like a film from the golden age of cinema, Tár runs its list of primary contributors upfront. I’m sure the internet is filled with theories about this stylistic choice. Me, I figure that the point is to underline that the film is about artistic creation, not as an abstraction but as an actual, corporeal, human activity. What better way to highlight the fact that art is made by (fallible, unsteady, selfish) humans than to put the humans that made the film first? One way or another, Tár is the first movie I can remember where the catering department is credited before the first line of dialogue.
Tár is the story of Lydia Tár, a brilliant conductor and composer played by a riveting Cate Blanchett. Lydia is celebrated, almost to the point of absurdity—she’s got an EGOT, she guest teaches at Juilliard, her tony Berlin apartment is festooned with awards, her upcoming book is called “Tár on Tár.”
The first thing Tár gets right (and this is essential) is capturing the world of elite orchestral music. This is a movie that is very at home with gourmet musical tastes, and I will say up front that you have to have a stomach for a particular artistic world that many people find unbearably pretentious—there is certainly some critique of that culture to be found in the film, but the movie also luxuriates in the complexities of classical music and the people who create it at the highest levels. I frequently wished I knew a little bit more about the ins and outs of symphony orchestras while watching the film. There’s a lot of talk about adagios and Mahler.
But Tár is ultimately a kind of cancellation story, a #MeToo tale. Lydia stands accused of misconduct—misconduct, namely sexual grooming, that is gradually revealed to us in bits and pieces as we settle into her life.
Lydia has, at times, been in the position to mentor younger people, such as in the previously mentioned classes at Juilliard—during a guest lecture she reams a self-proclaimed “BIPOC pangender” student who refuses to play Bach, given that he was a misogynist and a dead white guy—and as she is an immensely celebrated artiste in the chosen profession of these people, she holds power over them.
The questions Tár poses is, one, whether she’s guilty of abusing that position, and two, whether her obvious artistic genius complicates the question of her guilt.
