March 21, 2025
Thanks to Joy Reeves, a 2025 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s blog.
“Fortune befriends the bold,” Virgil first wrote in Aeneid. But in a world where boldness, the self-serving counterpart of courage, is so quick to estrange and sour relationships—is fortune’s friendship enough? Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár masterfully addresses this question in a unique, provocative portrait of a lonely musical genius.
Tár tells the story of Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), a high-profile conductor of the Berlin Orchestra, who curates and orchestrates her own reputation as carefully as she oversees her concert performances.
The audience first meets Tár in an onstage interview during which she promotes her upcoming memoir and performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Tár’s hardworking assistant Francesca keeps the conductor’s schedule busy; between interviews, guest lectures at Julliard, cello auditions, and quiet efforts to replace her own assistant conductor, Tár only has brief moments to spend with her adopted daughter Petra, or to spend salvaging her strained marriage with her wife Sharon. Haunted by her past, her base desires, and at times her own genius, Tár descends beneath her “maestro” facade and soon faces the trials of her own boldness.
Part of the mastery of Field’s work is in Lydia Tár’s betrayal of the audience: as the film goes on, it becomes increasingly difficult for viewers to sympathize with Tár; easier to instead draw one’s own conclusions, conspiracy theories, and scrutiny toward the conductor…all while somehow deeply invested in her redemption.
“Don’t be so easily offended,” Tár tells one of her students. She cripples egos. She berates men who idolize her. She even threatens a child. But Tár also dares her followers to approach music with raw, anonymous conviction rather than clinging to the safety of our own (politically-correct) identities. She defends the classics. She cries, and smiles, in the comfort of her favorite composers’ VCR tapes. In our sympathy toward her boldness, she quietly betrays us.
Betrayals aside, the film frustrates in other ways. Field seems to intersperse tense and climactic scenes—plot-drivers—with Tár’s long-winded and pompous dinner conversations, hallucinations, and lustful flashbacks, creating the disjointed montage that is Tár herself. The entire supporting cast successfully confuses us in guessing each character’s intentions for orbiting Tár. Rife with those unanswered questions, some parts of the film are simply dissatisfying. I believe that is Field’s intention. He introduces mystery, and then keeps the candle lit through the end of the movie.
The pace of the film is well suited to Tár’s character; I would say it moves with deliberacy more so than slowness. Finer production details, such as the casting of real musicians, the historical footage of Leonard Bernstein, or the jarringly unbalanced sound-mixing during the opening credits (Roland Winke), lend the film a certain musical authenticity. Repeatedly, the film challenges us to think through musical hermeneutics: What did the composer mean in writing his score? How important is the conductor’s identity?
There is little to criticize in this film, and more to ponder. It is well-suited for film discussion groups. (I was lucky enough to participate in HMU’s own Tár Zoom discussion on March 6th.) I strongly recommend the film for musical and non-musical audiences alike, since it provides lessons in the fickle friendship of fortune, and the “limits of valor,” rather than a technical dive into the mechanics of an orchestra itself.
Tár underscores the beautiful, terrible implications of music simply being “the way it makes you feel when you hear it;” an outlet to deal with “feelings so deep, and so special.”
There is no teacher better than Lydia Tár to carry this burdensome message in her heart. Tár offers a glimpse into that heart, and in doing so, presents us a masterpiece.
Photo credit: Shutterstock AI Generator
