Tár: Socrates at Juilliard

Todd Field’s Tár (2022) begins wide, dark, and puzzling. A dense, overlong array of film credits are difficult to read because the words, including the title, are printed in small white letters on black and appear slightly out of focus. Most of the action that follows is shot in subdued natural light that makes Gordon Willis’s dark victory in The Godfather (1971) seem like an eternal sunshine of a spotless mind.

 

But bright and clear are text communications via smartphone and emails on laptops, particularly social media chatter targeting the film’s title character Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett). Tár is a world-renowned classical music conductor and composer at the top of her game. The at first off-putting intrusion into the film of our now ubiquitous cyber-life is far from for nothing.

Interviewed at the beginning by actual New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik, this imaginary figure is established as a brilliant musician with a career of nearly superhuman achievement. The first woman conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, now conductor of the New York Philharmonic as was her idol and one-time teacher Leonard Bernstein, and also like Bernstein a teacher of young conductors at the famous Juilliard School conservatory in New York. But the shadow of Tár’s celebrity is half-lit with complexity and contradiction. 

 

In a scene pivotal to the story, Tár leads a seminar at Juilliard. In this master class for conductors shot in a long single take, Tár challenges a self-identified BIPOC student named Max (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist), proud to assert his ignorance of Johann Sebastian Bach based on the 18th century German composer’s ideological incompatibility with currently fashionable personal identity tags. (MP wonders how former Juilliard student Miles Davis would have responded to that.)

Tár uses the Socratic method to try to open her students’ ears and eyes, to provoke and encourage them to think to her level, to pay attention. But this confines her to a different space from Max and maybe all his classmates. Passionately focused on music, she hardly can be accused of personally attacking students whose names she barely knows; she scarcely leaves roadkill. But her “Millennial robots” take her comments and criticisms personally and vengeance shall be theirs. Also like Socrates, Tár has protegée-lovers, young women musicians because she is a lesbian, as teachers, professors, and artists have for centuries even predating the ancient Greek philosopher’s time. But this also stirs woes in this overpopulated era of the personal.

Tár is established comfortably in Berlin with her wife, Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), principal violinist for the Berlin Philharmonic; the couple have a small child, Petra (Mila Bogojevic). She travels with a personal assistant, Francesca Lentini (Noémie Merlant), a young conductor-protegée. Sharon appears to accept that Tár’s protegée-lovers are part of the package. However, Krista Taylor (Sylvie Flote), a former American protegée, seems not to share Tár’s “traditional” understanding of how these relationships work. Krista obsessively pursues Tár online and sends her gifts such as a first edition of Vita Sackville-West’s 1920 novel “Challenge” (written at the height of Vita’s passion for Violet Trefusis). Tár works out that her former protegée’s first name is an anagram for “at risk” while her ear and eye wander to replace her current protegée-lover.

Tár is a musical genius who clearly knows her business which is tough and highly competitive. We see her thrive as much making music as mastering the politics of running an orchestra. But her tone-deafness to the personal and to the spirit of the time makes this story intensely compelling and dramatic. 

 

What is a Tár? The musician’s origin is not a part of her celebrity biography and remains vague until much later in the story. The accented “á” in the name could make it Hungarian: In that language it means “warehouse”. One supposes that Tár is a native speaker of American English; she speaks a good fluent German; as part of her training, she also travelled to study the music of certain indigenous people in South America. She as though emerged from a background of dark “tar” to embrace her celebrity, concealing a personal present half-lit a shade out of focus amid spoken half-tones.

In describing her views on conducting in an early interview, Tár said: “Keeping time is no small thing. Time is the thing… Right from the beginning, I know what time it is.” Effectively directing an orchestra may be all about controlling the clock. But when Tár’s time spins out of joint, movement gets the best of her.

This later-day Socrates’s hemlock may be Chinese epic action movie music. But music is her life and her passion. Blanchett in this intense role brings off Tár’s apologia pro sua vita by keeping her true to her code—something her detractors never will know for themselves.

Or as Socrates concluded: “Which one of us on either side is going toward something that is better? It is not clear, except to the gods.”

Tár 2022 U.S. (158 minutes) Focus Features/Standard Film Company/EMJAG Productions. Directed and written by Todd Field; music by Hildur Guðnadóttir; cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister; editing by Monika Willi; production design by Marco Bittner Rosser; costume design by Bina Daigeler; produced by Field, Scott Lambert and Alexandra Milchan.