Todd Field’s film gives a female artist the same organizing consciousness every male artist in this archive has had. What Tár cannot see is how completely it benefits from the fall it has arranged.
Lydia Tár is the first woman to serve as chief conductor and artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic, a position she has held since 2013. She is the recipient of the EGOT — Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony — as well as the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Her recorded cycle of the Mahler symphonies is widely considered definitive. Her memoir, Tár on Tár, was a New York Times bestseller. She lives in Berlin with her wife, the violinist Sharon Goodnow, and their daughter, Petra.
[Fact-checked and approved for publication. One correction requested by subject’s publicist: the award date in paragraph three should read 2015, not 2014.]
[Second correction requested, November 2022: the subject has asked that this profile not be republished.]
[Third correction, December 2022: the subject’s request has been noted.]
| Director | Todd Field |
|---|---|
| Year | 2022 |
| Runtime | 158 minutes |
| Cast | Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Sophie Kauer, Mark Strong |
| Awards | Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress; Venice Film Festival selection |
| Streaming | Available on major platforms |
The Contempt verdict said: “It is the film Camille deserved and did not get. Most films are.” Thirty reviews have been building toward the correction that sentence implies: a film where a woman receives what every male artist in this archive has had — full organizing consciousness, a blind spot that belongs entirely to her, no structural protection arranged by a man holding the camera. Tár arrives as that correction. Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár is, without question, the most intelligent protagonist in the archive since Maud, and unlike Maud she is not standing at the periphery of someone else’s film. She is the film. Every frame is organised around her perception, her attention, her desire, her construction of herself. The correction is real.
Then the film destroys her, and it is worth asking whether the correction and the destruction are the same gesture.
Todd Field’s film, the first in sixteen years from the director of In the Bedroom, follows Lydia Tár across a compressed period of her professional life: rehearsals for a new Mahler recording, a master class at Juilliard that goes badly, the arrival of a new cellist named Olga who disturbs the orchestra’s equilibrium and Lydia’s concentration, the emergence of accusations from a former protégée, and the unraveling that follows. The film is precise and slow and deeply suspicious of its own protagonist in ways that Lydia cannot perceive. Field gives her the camera’s full attention, then uses that attention to document what she cannot see: the fear in the junior conductor whose career she is affecting, the accumulation of small violences against the people in her orbit, the gap between Lydia’s account of herself and what the film is quietly recording.
This is the “artist and self-knowledge” thread’s first female entry, and what shifts when the artist is a woman is not the blind spot itself. The blind spot is structurally identical to every male artist’s in this archive: the artist who has mistaken their own seriousness for a dispensation from accountability, who has arranged the world around their sensitivity while remaining insensitive to the world. Stardust Memories’ Sandy Bates organizes his relationships into material. Samet in About Dry Grasses mistakes intellectual sophistication for emotional honesty. Lydia Tár believes her commitment to the work exempts her from ordinary ethical demands. The blind spot is the same.
What is not the same is the film’s relationship to the fall.
Watch the Juilliard master class sequence. A student argues that he cannot connect to Bach because Bach was a white man. Lydia dismantles him, methodically and mercilessly, with the full weight of her knowledge and authority: she calls the position an identity-based reductionism that forecloses genuine musical engagement, she is right, and she does it with such surgical contempt that the student is left publicly humiliated. The scene is filmed to let us admire her. She is formidable. The camera wants us to feel her formidability. Then the scene is posted online, stripped of context, and the clip is the first thing that arrives ahead of the larger accusations. The film allows us to have admired her in that moment and then shows us the admiration weaponized. It is an extraordinary formal operation: Field makes us complicit and then reminds us that we are complicit.
The film gives Tár everything the male artists in this archive were given: the camera’s full attention, the organizing consciousness, the blind spot that belongs entirely to her. Then it gives her something none of them received. The bill.
The male artists in this archive do not receive the bill. Sandy Bates at the end of Stardust Memories is celebrated by his fans at a retrospective screening, complicated but undestroyable. Guido in 8½ conjures a fantasy of reconciliation and the camera grants it. Samet in About Dry Grasses is exposed and diminished but not removed. The world tolerates the male artist’s blind spot because the world has always organised itself around the male artist’s blind spot. The female artist’s blind spot is identical in structure. The world’s tolerance is not.
Tár knows this. Field builds the film to make it visible: the same behaviour that the male conductors who preceded Lydia almost certainly performed is catastrophic in her, not because the behaviour is more extreme but because her position is more precarious. She has climbed to a height the world was not designed to sustain. The film shows us the fall without sentimentality and without exoneration, which is formally honest. What it cannot see is that showing the fall with this much formal care, with Cate Blanchett filmed at this level of attention, in this much detail, is also a kind of aesthetic enjoyment of the fall. The film that gives a woman the organizing consciousness also gives the audience the pleasure of watching her lose it. This is not the same as Contempt‘s final car crash, which is simply punitive. It is more sophisticated than that. It is also not innocent.
The film in this archive that creates the sharpest friction is our review of Autumn Sonata, Bergman’s 1978 film about Charlotte, the female concert pianist whose career has consumed everything around it, whose daughter Eva has spent a life absorbing the cost. Charlotte has a blind spot — she cannot see what her ambition has cost her children — but Bergman’s film is not organized around Charlotte’s consciousness. It is organized around Eva’s. The camera is with the daughter, the wound, the person who paid. Tár inverts this completely: the camera is with Lydia, not with the people who paid. We get the full interiority of the artist rather than the full interiority of the cost. The difference between the two films is the difference between a cinema of consequences and a cinema of consciousness. Bergman chooses consequences and is devastating. Field chooses consciousness and is thrilling. Both choices have a price that neither film fully acknowledges.
The last sequence: Lydia in Southeast Asia, conducting a video game orchestra for a costumed audience. She has lost Berlin, lost Sharon, lost the Mahler recording. The work continues in a different register, smaller and stranger, and Blanchett plays it with a stillness that the film refuses to either endorse or mock. The camera watches her conduct. She is still formidable. The audience in costumes does not know who she was. The film does not tell us whether this is punishment, survival, or simply what comes next when the structure falls and the person inside it does not.
Thirty reviews ago, this blog argued that every film unconsciously reveals something its guard is down about. Tár is the most self-aware film in the archive, the one most conscious of its own mechanisms. Its guard never comes down. What it reveals is what high self-awareness cannot prevent: that giving a woman the fall of a male artist requires the film to be interested in her falling, and that interest has a history, and the history is visible if you have been watching long enough.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Autumn Sonata (Bergman, 1978): reviewed here; the female artist whose blind spot is filmed entirely from the perspective of what it cost — and where the contrast with Field’s choice to stay inside Lydia’s consciousness reveals what each filmmaker believes about where the argument lives.
All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950): reviewed here; ambition organised around a woman’s rise and fall in a world that arranged the fall in advance, and where the wit of the screenplay cannot entirely conceal that the film requires its most threatening woman to be removed so the others can settle.