I saw Todd Fields' Tar in a movie theater about three years ago. The film impressed me with its discipline and apparently intimate knowledge of the classical music business. The titular Tar is a woman-conductor who has ruthlessly devoted her life to achieving fame at the podium; in the end, she is humiliated as a result of her own overweening ambition and arrogance -- when summarized in this fashion, the film seems to be another picture in which a woman is punished for acting like a man. In this case, Tar suffers because she aspires to be like her mentor, Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein's behavior, tolerable in a man, is unseemly and uncanny in a woman. But the film is much bigger, more ambitious, and digressive than my summary. As years pass, the picture seems to grow in status and is, generally, accorded the honor of being one of the most important films made during this new century. Many reviews has remarked that Todd Fields, who appeared as an actor in Kubrick's last picture, the posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut, seems to have absorbed the precision and obsessive concern with detail apparent in that director's films. In some ways, Tar's ambition to become a female Leonard Bernstein (complete with their joint obsession with Mahler) mirrors Fields' allegiance to the rigor that Kubrick shows in his movies.
I won't address the picture in this note in any detail. I have reviewed the movie elsewhere in this Blog and encourage readers to access that writing to view my earlier thoughts on the film. Here, I will address a contention that everything in Tar is highly deliberate and intentional. This applies, I think, even to sequences that on first viewing seem disorienting and, even, remote from the films' narrative thrust. On a second viewing, it's clear that all episodes in the movie are directed toward elucidating the film's plot and character development. For instance, we see Tar slamming her fists violently into a boxing bag -- she seems to use boxing exercises as a way to sublimate her rage when her ambitions are stalled and opposed. This seems merely a picturesque extravagance until we understand that the movie will climax with a savage attack that Tar mounts on a rival conductor whom she believes has betrayed her. The rival is tall man and she plows into him on stage when he is directing Mahler's Fifth Symphony for the Berlin Philharmonic. She knocks the much larger man to the floor, pummels him, and, then, not content with her initial aggression begins to savage him again -- this might seem implausible since Tar is not physically imposing, but, in fact, we understand from watching the picture that she's a trained boxer who runs daily for her fitness and, no doubt, is far stronger, more physically aggressive, and much more lethal than the man that she attacks. The man's betrayal is established in an early scene that we might regard as mere atmospherics -- Tar and the man discuss conducting and he asks her if she will give him "a peek" at the annotations she has made on her score of the Mahler symphony. She refuses, but at the climax of the movie, we understand that the annotated score has been stolen from her apartment and is being used by her rival to conduct the symphony. Early scenes that we may not understand to have narrative significance in retrospect are important to establish plot points that will be disclosed two hours later. Similarly, there is a scene at the outset of the film in which Tar is anxiously waiting backstage, performing breathing exercises and, otherwise, girding herself for a public performance. We expect that she is about to conduct an orchestra but learn that she is actually about to appear at a public forum to discuss music with the New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik. Just before, Tar attacks the rival conductor, we see her again pacing nervously and, then, breathing deeply before going out on stage. But the symphony has already begun -- an off-stage trumpeter plays a fanfare - and, so, we are confused -- what's going on here? If she's conducting, why isn't Tar at the podium already? In fact, she's preparing to assault the conductor. These two scenes of Tar preparing for performance rhyme with one another and supply context for the climax.
One of the most baffling sequences in the film involves Tar's final humiliation. She has gone to Manilla in the Philippines to conduct the music for the game Monster Hunter in concert -- this is a far cry from Mahler. She complains of jet lag to the clerk at the rather seedy hotel where she is staying; he seems to misunderstand her because he sends her to a brothel. At the brothel, the girls are arrayed demurely in a "fishbowl" -- that is, behind glass sitting in a semi-circle with each woman identified by a number. The patron is to inspect the women in the fishbowl and, then, pick the one that pleases him (or, in this case, her.) One of the girls is numbered as 5. She and Tar exchange pained looks. We don't know if the transaction is consummated. In the next shot, Tar runs out of the brothel onto Manilla's busy night street and vomits in the gutter. This is a striking scene but one that is difficult to interpret. There are two auditions featured in the movie. In the world of professional musicians, auditions are blind -- the candidates appear behind a screen that conceals them. The purpose for these "blind auditions" is to eliminate bias and make certain that performers are judged on the merits of their playing and not by gender, attractiveness, or ethnicity. Nonetheless, we see that Tar manipulates these blind auditions to make certain that a young Russian cellist, whom she desires, wins the competition. (Tar has been accused of using her prominence to groom young female musicians so that she can seduce them - and there is truth to this accusation of predatory behavior.) The scene with the prostitutes in the fish-bowl correlates to these auditions -- the selection, that is, of a sexual partner. The "fishbowl audition," if we can call it that,,is the exact opposite of the so-called "blind audition", but both are configured to relate to Tar's choice of a young woman for sexual purposes. It's my contention that Tar recognizes the correlation between the two types of auditions, a similarity based on her sexual preferences, and is repelled, even nauseated by the association. Number 5 relates, of course, to Mahler's Fifth Symphony.
Fields' direction is reticent and the plot proceeds by leaping over snares and pitfalls -- the narrative is highly elliptical. Unanswered questions add to the film's eerie, horror-movie ambience. Why does the Russian cellist live in a literal hole-in-the-wall? (The fissure, in a heavily placarded and graffiti-smeared wall along which Tar runs for her exercise, leads into a ruinous courtyard that seems to have been occupied by squatters. There are wet passages and subterranean corridors that look like imagery from Tarkovsky. Is this some sort of reflection of the squalor of Tar's sexual predation?) A short scene in which the cosmopolitan Tar returns to her humble family home in Queens is startling. She was a different person when she lived with her family of origin -- literally, it seems, because her brother seen from the top of stairs in a long shot calls her Linda, not "Lydia" which is her assumed name in the art world. Field's reticence is best illustrated by another long shot scene -- the only person who genuinely loves Tar for herself is Petra, the daughter of Tar's girlfriend (first violin in the symphony). Near the end of the movie, after Tar has betrayed her girlfriend, the protagonist goes to Petra's school to pick up the child. (She has previously intervened on behalf of the child with a bully -- a fearsome scene in which Tar, a self-proclaimed "U-haul Lesbian" (whatever that means), goes up to the other child and introduces herself in German as Petra's "father", then, terrorizes the child in a dramatic, even, horrific way). The girlfriend suddenly appears in the schoolyard and, as Tar begs her to not deny her access to the child, leads Petra away. This is a painful scene, but distanced, in accord with Fields' tactful direction -- we can't see how poor Tar reacts which is a mercy.
As I suspected, Tar seems inexhaustible. There is more to see in the film the second time that you watch it.
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