Tar

 I don't have the know-how to type the name of Todd Field's 2022 film Tar correctly.  In the film's title, the word is adorned with an elegant slash of diacritical mark above the vowel.  This mark, however, is an affectation, an irritating and pretentious mystification that seems to correlate with no known language.  In the movie, people pronounce the name just like the word for a common black and sticky substance.  "Tar" with its ornamental diacritical mark above the "a" is simply an trademark, an exotic sign that tells us that the protagonist in Field's movie has set herself apart from the common herd -- she's a rara avis, a self-defined anomaly:  a female orchestral conductor, a self-made man (the gender is used intentionally), someone who has converted her love for classical music into something strange and sinister, the ruthless exercise of will to power.  Field's movie establishes Lydia Tar as a sacred monster, a genius who is also as villainous within her hermetic and claustrophobic world as Richard III and the movie, of course, has only one direction that it can take this material -- the film is a tragedy, classically imagined, that is, the fall of a noble and gifted person due to their overweening pride.  

Tar is enormously long (two hours and 47 minutes) and its loquacious script is exceedingly subtle and intricate with nuance.  But the general arc of the narrative is simple enough.  With a few exceptions, Tar has established her grip on the classical music world on the basis of steely intelligence, unremitting hard work, and fear.  She is liked, as the saying goes, but not well-liked.  And, over the course, of the movie, we see her burning one bridge after another until, at the end, there is no one left to support, or, even, advise or commiserate with her.  The film is tough-minded enough to show that Tar is resourceful and, even in the abyss of professional disgrace, undaunted -- and, although there's no trace of this outcome in the plot displayed in the movie, it's pretty apparent that Tar is not defeated at the end, but merely exiled to plan her comeback.  Tar, the movie, is fairly schematic, although enigmatic and puzzling throughout -- there are a number of scenes that I have difficulty interpreting and eerie, peculiar details.  (Tar's stepdaughter, Petra, has to have her foot held at night or she can't sleep and there's a scene in a brothel so grotesque and bizarre that we are reminded, as if the film's style would let us forget, that the director Todd Fields most notably first appeared in films as a perverse character in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.  Tar is full of gruesome-looking subterranean passages, haunted autumnal woods, and demon-possessed metronomes -- as with Eyes Wide Shut which Tar's tone resembles, the movie is, in part, a grim horror film.)  The movie introduces Tar is the simplest, most direct, and economically formulaic way:  Adam Gopnik, from The New Yorker, playing Adam Gopnik, introduces Tar at a symposium, apparently an art's festival presented by his magazine and he literally provides us with the conductor's curriculum vitae. Incidentally, this introduction explains an odd detail in the opening of the film.  For some reason, Fields puts the lengthy technical credits to the movie at the very beginning of the film while we hear a rather ghostly, lilting melody sung in an unknown language in a high-pitched voice.  Gopnik's introduction tells us that Tar collected folk songs among the Peruvian Indians and this, we retrospectively conclude, is the source of the melody underlying the opening titles.  (This technique occurs repeatedly in the movie; we are shown a detail but only understand the significance of that image or dialogue later in the picture -- the effect is that the viewer gropes his or her way through the movie.) Gopnik says that Tar is the director of the Berlin Philharmonic, is promoting a book called Tar on Tar, and is working hard to complete her cycle of Mahler symphonies, recording the Fifth symphony by that composer with the orchestra in Berlin, where she lives and maintains a home with her wife, the concertmistress of the philharmonic, and, another apartment in a spooky building where she composes and works on her writing.  We are told that Tar is an acolyte of Leonard Bernstein -- he was her mentor -- and that her perspective on the Mahler symphonies differs from Bernstein because she is somehow focused on the relationship between Mahler and his wife, Alma; she proclaims that the symphony is about love.  Tar has formed a non-profit enterprise called Accordion to encourage young women to become orchestral conductors -- she has just opened the curriculum to men as well.  (The concept of the accordion will re-appear late in the movie as abject evidence of Tar's humiliation).  Tar is fierce in all respects.  When her wife's daughter, Petra, whom Tar seems to genuinely love, is bullied at school, she goes to the academy, announcing that she is Petra's "father", and, then, makes a blood-curdling threat to the little girl who is tormenting the child.  Tar boxes ferociously and runs distance through the woods.  In one scene, in which she is upset, she conducts the Berlin orchestra as if engaged in a karate duel with an invisible adversary.  At the climax of the film, she puts her boxing skills to good effect and literally beats a conductor whom she suspects has stolen her "performance score" of the Mahler Fifth -- an assault for which we are prepared by an early scene in which the other conductor, a rather feckless weak man, begs for her to let him read her annotations on the Mahler score.  (Fields' direction is so precise and skillful that in a number of scenes, in which the performance score is notably missing from Tar's bookshelf, we see the gap in the bound scores as an ominous fissure, a sign of something very bad about to occur.)  

The main strands in the plot involve several simultaneously occurring misfortunes.  Tar has seduced a young woman named Krista and, then, when the relationship ended (Krista was apparently stalking her) ghosted her former protegee.  Krista commits suicides and emails are discovered (or, at least, not deleted by Tar's longsuffering assistant, Francesca) and this implicate the conductor in the woman's death.  A lawsuit ensues and Tar has to give a deposition.  Francesca, who has been a lover, ultimately abandons Tar, leaving her to her own devices.  An elderly conductor, the assistant, it seems, at the Berlin Philharmonic, has to be "rotated" out of his job with the orchestra -- he was apparently instrumental in Tar's achieving the role as artistic director and chief conductor of the orchestra, but now she is willing to betray him.  Tar is scheming to seduce a Russian cello-player and manipulates the situation into giving this young woman the part of the soloist in an Elgar cello sonata -- this is despite the fact that the logical candidate for that part would be the first-chair cello player with Berlin Philharmonic.  Other cello players with the Philharmonic refuse to audition for the role, but Tar has Olga, the Russian girl, seek the part -- even though she's not even on the payroll of the orchestra.  As it happens, Olga is as transactional and ruthless as Tar and it's not at all clear who is manipulating whom in this relationship.  An unfairly edited cell-phone video of Tar taunting a pansexual young man about identity politics surfaces and suggests that Tar is using Accordion as an enterprise to groom young musicians to be her lovers.  The board of directors at Accordion are appalled and Tar is further condemned for not advising them about the lawsuit arising from Krista's suicide.  Tar is effectively ousted from her own non-profit.  She is also ousted from the role of conducting Mahler's Fifth symphony for Deutsche Grammophon and, when another conductor is put at the podium, she violently assaults him.  Tar's wife, the concertmistress with the Berlin Philharmonic, kicks her out and severs Tar's only uncomplicated relationship, her role as Petra's protector.  (Tar's wife is not incensed about the woman's infidelity with the Russian cellist -- instead, she is enraged that Tar has not consulted with her or asked for her advice; after all, Tar's wife says, I helped you to worm your way into the Berlin Philharmonic and, so, why have you excluded me from these matters that are potentially disastrous to our family?)  In the midst of all these travails, Tar is insomniac, haunted by strange and disturbing visions, and physically deteriorating -- she has fallen and damaged her face after an encounter with some kind of monster in a subterranean passage full of dripping, drizzling water like a nightmare out of Tarkovsky.  Tar loses her position with the Berlin Philharmonic and it appears that critics have "canceled her" -- her book will probably not be well-reviewed.  But she travels to the Philippines and, in an utterly bizarre and grotesque, final sequences struggles to reinvent herself.  The final shot pans across an audience that is made up of nothing but monsters.

The movie is replete with curious and startling details.  An old German conductor equates "denazification" with being canceled for sexual impropriety.  Tar can't tolerate being called Maestra because it draws attention to her femininity -- but, nonetheless, everyone uses that honorific with her.  In one peculiar and haunting scene, Tar goes back to her childhood home, an empty decaying house in a place that looks like Allentown, Pennsylvania -- she sees her brother, who calls her "Linda".  Tar denounces her enemies repeatedly as "robots" but she behaves as if programmed mechanically herself.  There is lots of inside "baseball" in the movie:  you have to know that M.T.T. means Michael Tilson Thomas; D.G. means Deutsche Grammophon.  In one startling scene, in which Tar taunts the bi-sexual conducting student, she hunches over the piano playing a Bach Brandenburg sonata, imitating the unique posture and gestures of Glenn Gould.  There are remarkable sequences, mostly in pidgin German, in which Tar rehearses the Philharmonic and demonstrates her perfectionism and genius.  Fields, who wrote the script, luxuriates in tiny, telling details:  in one scene, Tar lunches with Olga and suggests that the Russian have a "cucumber salad" -- instead, Olga orders a veal cutlet with fried potatoes (while Tar has the cucumbers) which she eats ravenously.  This little sequence tells you pretty much all that you need to know about the balance of power in Tar's relationship with her new lover and protegee.  After an old woman in the apartment above her flat dies, the family of the dead woman come to Tar's door and say that they can hear her practicing in her rooms.  Assuming this is a compliment, Tar thanks them.  But the family says that they are trying to sell the apartment and that they would appreciate it if she would avoid "making noise" when the realtor is showing the place. One man's music is another man's noise.  

Field shoots with movie with impeccable taste and logic.  He masterfully uses a very wide-screen format.  The picture is devised around extremely long takes and resembles Kubrick for most of its length.  Kubrick was more relentlessly symmetrical in his compositions; Fields is much more relaxed but, equally, precise and perfectionist.  The sound engineering is a marvel of eerie noises, sudden bursts of orchestral music, and people screaming faintly in the dark.  The sound is hyper-directional and, on the big screen, comes at you from all angles.  The dialogue is fantastically sophisticated and allusive.  It is worth considering how this movie would be regarded if its protagonist were male -- the genius of the picture is to address issues as to cancel-culture and sexual harassment using a powerful woman as a villain.  This clarifies issues as the privileges of genius but, also, makes these problems more luminously dark and obscure as well.  Cate Blanchet, who plays Tar, will be nominated for every possible award for her performance and deservedly so -- but the picture is too dauntingly intellectual to reach a large audience.  That said, Tar is one of the best movies I have seen in past couple years.