Tár

I managed to fit in one more Oscar-nominated film this afternoon - Todd Fields’s composed, stylized, and unnerving psychological-suspense study of one Lydia Tár, an accomplished orchestra conductor (in the first ten minutes of the movie we are provided with an exhaustive list of all her accomplishments) who leads the Berlin Symphony. Lydia Tár is a force - as a conductor, as a partner, as a parent - and Cate Blanchett, in the title role, is doing some all caps ACTING throughout every frame, most chillingly when threatening her daughter’s playground bully (in perfect German, no less). The film is an unsettling, tense-making slow burn of moody lighting (look for figures lurking in the background), haunting sounds (even when the movie is “silent” there is a distinct hum of blank noise), and impressive long takes (Tár leading a master class at Juilliard and shaming a young “BIPOC pangender” student). Lydia Tár is a classicist; she reveres Bach and, most importantly, Mahler, and she is confounded and repulsed by the contemporary (she seems genuinely shocked when a promising young artist tells her that she discovered her cellist idol on YouTube, not vinyl). And the contemporary world ultimately contributes to her downfall, primarily through a cleverly edited video that suggests her other life. Ultimately, the joke’s on Lydia - she’s an uneditable VHS tape exposed and embarrassed by the digital world.