Tár begins with the sounds of unseen forest, a buzz of insects and birdcalls that backs the voice of Shipibo-Conibo healer Elisa Vargas Fernandez as it floats across the black screen of the opening credits. Why? Well, presumably because the titular character, eminent conductor Lydia Tár, has an ethnomusicology degree – along with a Grammy, an Emmy, an Oscar, a Tony, and a long litany of other accomplishments, which are read out by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik in the public interview that sets the stage for the film.
Played by Cate Blanchett, Lydia exists amidst grandiose music halls, fine dining establishments, and private jet rides between New York and Berlin, where she lives with her partner and first violinist, Sharon (Nina Hoss), and their young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic). Lydia glides imperiously through the world of the western cultural elite on the wings of her immense talent and personal charm (a charm that, as the film progresses, will read increasingly as extreme narcissism). Following the Gopnik event, an attractive young woman with a red bag approaches Lydia and fawns coquettishly; Lydia flirts back until she is whisked away by another attractive young woman, her personal assistant and sometimes-protégée Francesca (Noémie Merlant) who has watched the interaction with an agitation that might read as jealously. From the outset we are plunged into Lydia’s allure. Blanchett masterfully inhabits the magnetism of an extreme, elite self-assurance, and more precisely its particular embodiment in a lesbian with a masculine edge: Lydia lounging in her pristine suit at a restaurant table, tossing off dry observations, waving aside a wine glass, and fielding the admiring exhortations of her lunch partner all with the same careless, deft ease; Lydia conducting a master class at Juilliard, sauntering around auditorium in her boots, hands in the pockets of her loose-fitting slacks, slouching against the music stand, or pushing up her sleeves at the piano.
“I am Petra’s father,” says Lydia in crisp German when she strolls into a Berlin elementary school to have a highly effective word with her daughter’s bully. Cue cackles of delight from the queers in the audience. Such a scene encapsulates the film’s strengths; Lydia’s confident, masculine swagger extends to her methods: “I’ll get you,” she says calmly to the child, “and if you tell any grown-up what I said to you, they won’t believe you… because I’m a grown up.” Her total lack of scruples in dealing with the little blonde bully speaks to a habit of pure power. It is impressive, and it works, and if the means are a little questionable, the ends seem worthy: Petra comes home happy, freed of her playground oppression (Petra is not white, and has two lesbian moms). But as instances of Lydia’s manipulative behaviour pile up, this aura of total self-assurance, which here might remain endearing, even seductive, is rendered much more sinister.
This is what is initially so strong about the film: it highlights what is seductive about Lydia and her world while provoking in us a deep and growing unease – and sows the dawning possibility that these seductive and unsettling elements are in fact a package deal. Take the aforementioned master class at Juilliard, a scene which directly stages the film’s larger debate about whether or not art can transcend the flaws of its creator. Lydia’s ability to interpret music is such that even Max, the student who will not listen to Bach on grounds of misogyny, momentarily softens when Lydia renders his melodies through her fingers. Of course, Max, a self-declared “BIPOC pansexual person” who cannot (or is not allowed to) substantiate his own position, ends up serving more as a New York Times fantasy figure of young people’s “identity politics” than as an actual character (or, indeed, argument). But even if Field does little justice to a younger generation’s complicated attempts to reckon with the societal violence they have inherited, he does not let Lydia off easily here. The class collapses as she increasingly oversteps her pedagogical authority, too assured of her own genius, too used to dictating the terms, and too accustomed to impunity. Likewise, the film effectively builds and dismantles her appeal. It feels extremely important that the former, and not just the latter, is present. For Lydia is initially, if never not troublingly, attractive, and this particular genre of attractiveness is not one typically corroborated onscreen: the cool, unadorned, brusque-yet-refined self-sovereignty of a lesbian who against the odds has appropriated for herself the physical and cognitive entitlement of a particular kind of elite, white masculinity; a lesbian who wears this power with breathtaking ease.
Tár is a rare film for this reason. Lydia’s type of appeal is not one that is depicted often, consisting as it does of the attractiveness and the desire that belong to a self-assured, powerful older woman who possesses no stereotypical feminine charm, but only the imposing matter-of-factness of her accomplishment, and a masculinity subtle enough to be invisible to an untrained or uninterested eye. Furthermore, Tár promises to deal precisely with the deep ambivalence which stems from the way such a figure both troubles and upholds existing modes of power. This appeal remains largely illegible in our heteronormative world (and in fact its general illegibility is an important part of its experience). It’s thrilling to see someone like this on the big screen, and to know that a straight audience is being made to understand that a young and conventionally attractive woman would pursue her (“Can I text you?” asks red bag woman, grasping Lydia’s hands when their flirtation is cut short by Francesca’s agitated intervention). Moreover, inasmuch as Tár echoes the plethora of contemporary “#MeToo” narratives, depicting this appeal is crucial to telling this story responsibly, for to not give the viewer a window into her desirability – sexual or otherwise – would render the women that flock to her mere dupes.
And yet why might Todd Field choose to tell the “#MeToo” story, which is deeply patriarchal and overwhelmingly male, through this figure, that of a self-proclaimed “u-haul lesbian”? (This declaration was the least believable moment of Lydia’s lesbian existence, by the way: first of all, she’s obviously not a u-haul lesbian; second of all, it seems out of character for her to draw attention to her lesbianism at all). As patriarchal structures of power insinuate themselves far beyond the bounds of the identities they create, Tár might have been an opportunity to depict the way a particular kind of masculine power brings all its violence along with it, even when embodied in an unlikely vessel. But precisely what is interesting – and compelling – about a woman like Lydia is that the power she wears so easily is not supposed to belong to her. And, in our world, unlike the fantasy space of the film – which, as A. O. Scott notes, “doesn’t so much smash a glass ceiling as dissolve it by creative fiat” – it would likely belong to her only incompletely. In fact, insofar as Lydia is rendered deeply suspect, so too might her proclamation that gender disparity is increasingly irrelevant seem a privileged and willed delusion. And yet the film seems to agree with her in its total collapse of a male-dominated #MeToo narrative with a lesbian swap-out. For despite its initial promise, the film does not address the question of what it means for a lesbian to take on this patriarchal role. How did Lydia get to a position in which misogyny and homophobia seem far behind her? Are they far behind her? For the most part, it seems like it. And so the audience never escapes this delusion of Lydia’s: that her life is no different from that of a straight man.
This is why, when the young, talented Russian cellist, Olga, the latest object of Lydia’s desire, snubs her to go on a date with a man, this non-reciprocity, rather than reading as just another detail from an archetypal #MeToo story, tastes a different kind of sour. For despite the film’s best efforts to make Lydia’s lesbianism a non-event, it cannot remove sexuality from the equation. Both in the film’s own narrative logic and in our still-homophobic media landscape the impropriety –the ick factor – of Lydia’s desire for Olga is inseparable from her lesbianism. Unlike Francesca, who is waiting for Lydia to make her career but also seems to seek an emotional intimacy from her that was perhaps once more forthcoming, Olga is alluring in her freedom: she is not beholden to Lydia in any way save through a pure appreciation of her artistry. As Olga defies Lydia’s expectations of refinement, tearing into a meat dish rather than prescribing to an enlightened vegetarianism, interrupting Lydia rather than deferring to her, oblivious or indifferent to the niceties of elitist social hierarchies, the implication is that Olga does not share her perversion – any of her perversions. In this way the film’s decision to tell the “#MeToo” story in a lesbian key shrivels ineluctably into the most tired homophobia. Lydia’s minimal psychological backstory, a narrative of class-transcendence briefly shoehorned-in towards the end of the film, cannot bear the weight of her behaviour; her fatal flaw becomes perforce her sexuality, which, if not necessarily the root of her pathology, is depicted as the main site of its exercise.
Equally if not more egregious is the film’s use of the Amazon and the Philippines (yes, that somewhere in Asia at the end of the film is the Philippines, indicated by her hosts’ conversation in Tagalog, by the jeepneys on the streets – and then muddled by Field’s intermittent use of Thai, rather than Filipino, actors, as if no one who matters would be able to hear the difference). That the mention of fieldwork in the Amazon is just another accolade in the opening litany of Lydia’s resume might have read as a critique – the extraction of indigenous knowledge for conversion into western accomplishment – but its symbolic recurrence blocks such a possibility. If a more generous reading might intuit a colonial haunting at work, some sinister echo of a past shared by Lydia, her former student Krista, and the Shipibo-Conibo in the Amazon, Tár itself accomplishes no such Hanekean move. Instead, whatever colonial backstory it might be referencing collapses into a vague orientalist mysticism, used here as a lazy replacement for its white western character’s missing psychological depth.
Meanwhile, if the indigenous Amazon stands in for impenetrable depth, the Philippines is not even afforded the dignity of ancient opacity; rather, in-keeping with predictable colonial imaginaries, it is figured as pure surface, a site of derivative, even servile mimicry. Lydia goes to the Philippines in a strangely extended dramatization of her fall from grace. Exiled from the western elite after allegations of “grooming” young women, manipulative practices, sabotage of Krista’s career, and so on sully her name and get her fired, she finds a conducting job in the (unnamed) Philippines. Here Filipinos are the dupes who will accept the fallen Western star, give her flowers and provide her with tour guides. Through them Lydia manages to retain some echo of the power to which she is accustomed. Yet the Philippines is a poor substitute for Europe. White tablecloths are replaced by cramped outdoor eateries shared with passing motorcyclists; private jets by rain-drenched tricycles; the gleaming halls of the Berlin Philharmonic by dingy florescent-lit dressing rooms. More profoundly, top-notch European professional musicians, who are portrayed as having subjectivity and artistry in their own right, are replaced by a sea of identically-dressed Asian bodies, who shout “good morning” in unison in reply to Lydia’s crisp greeting. “Let’s talk about the intention behind the piece,” she says to this crowd – and the scene cuts off there, effectively implying the absurdity of trying to have this conversation in this place. The force of Lydia’s fall is achieved through the suggestion that her artistic genius will be lost on what Field depicts as a pop-culture obsessed Asian horde, lost on the natives who have been taught to mimic the trappings of western civilisation but who will never truly understand it. If we might dare to question whether these are pearls, it is only because the implication is that they are now cast before swine.
The immense irony of this racist portrayal is its historical specificity. For despite never naming it, and despite using actors with incongruous accents, Field has chosen the perfect location in the Philippines. Of course Lydia would end up here, where US imperialism created widespread competence in English and extensive familiarity with Western culture, moulding it, by bloody force, into a comfortable “rest and recreation” station for its soldiers during WWII, one which is still now an easy retirement option for aging white American men who wish to live in a luxury they cannot afford in the USA – preferably accompanied by a Filipina half their age and with a fraction of their capital. Both for Lydia and for Field, then, the Philippines is a convenient place to work. And, precisely because it has been rendered “convenient” for the west, the colonial fate of the Philippines is to be always the stand-in. As Lydia learns from her (Thai) guide as she takes a boat trip, there are crocodiles in the river because they were left there by the crew of a Marlon Brando film, and have survived, and multiplied, in the decades since. This film would be Apocalypse Now – which is set in Vietnam but was filmed in the Philippines with Filipino actors. Once again Field seems to almost signal a meta-awareness, or even a critique, of this state of affairs. The Brando, detail, for one, implies the enduring destruction and danger of a colonial past.
Likewise, in a near-final moment, Lydia asks a pharmacist to recommend a massage parlour and is sent to a marble-floored, glass-walled location where the receptionist tells her to choose a number – a “number” being one of the identically white-robed female masseuses who sit with downcast eyes in the “fishbowl.” It is implied that this is upscale prostitution, and Lydia, upon meeting the eyes of masseuse “#5”, has to run out to the street to retch. This scene might echo scenes in the orchestra – Lydia’s power to choose numbered players who blind audition, or more generally the way she exerts professional power over the young women she desires. Is this, then, a moment of self-confrontation? A recognition of the patriarchal-colonial power she exerts, its violence laid bare in the (neo)colonial context? One would hope. But, like the treatment of the Amazon, it is executed too weakly. Again, Lydia’s experience is too seamlessly that of a man’s – would the pharmacist really so immediately assume she was looking for female prostitutes? And in the end, Tár treats the Philippines precisely like one of these masseuses: it is interchangeable, it doesn’t exist in its own right, and is only a stand-in for the guilt attached to events elsewhere.
Tár collapses – with almost stunning inevitability – into precisely what the portrayal of its protagonist seems to critique. For despite its aspiration to nuance and complication – its ability to both enact the seduction of power-backed transcendence and render it deeply suspect – the film’s sexual, racial, and colonial politics are squarely those of the most predictable elite white western liberalism. Much like its protagonist, then, Tár begins thrillingly, full of promise, and ends as a bitter disappointment.