Early on, we witness her discreet betrayal and casual gaslighting of Sharon, her quiet humiliation of a benefactor and rival conductor (Mark Strong) and her chilling confrontation with Petra’s bully. (Kauer, a professional cellist as well as an actor, does her own playing in the film.)ĭoes the suspense that builds through the film’s long, faultlessly executed middle section arise from the dread that something terrible will happen to her, or the premonition that she will do something horrible? Both outcomes are plausible. A young Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer), auditions for a place in the string section, catching Lydia’s attention with her expressive bowing technique and her blue suede boots. Lydia’s assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), who has musical ambitions of her own, gazes at her boss with adoration, terror and simmering rage. The orchestra’s long-serving second conductor (Allan Corduner) has outstayed his welcome. The couple’s intimacy is edged with wariness and unspoken resentment. Lydia lives with Sharon (Nina Hoss), the Philharmonic’s first violinist, and their young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic). Meanwhile, there are hints of domestic and professional trouble. Anatomy of a Scene: Field narrates an emotional moment from his film in which Lydia Tár opens the door to her childhood home.Back Into the Limelight : The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion.Review : “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage Drama Cate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field. (Nathalie Stutzmann, recently installed as musical director of the Atlanta Symphony, is currently the only one in America, as Marin Alsop was until she stepped down from the Baltimore Symphony last year.) That would be a remarkable story, given that in the real world vanishingly few major orchestras have been led by women. How did she do it? If Lydia Tár were a real person, “Tár” might take the conventional musical biopic route, tracing a path from modest beginnings through hard work and lucky breaks, adversity and triumph. She has recorded all of Mahler’s symphonies but one, which is coming soon, as is a book, “Tár on Tár,” that will surely be a best seller. and belongs to the highly exclusive EGOT club, having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. She’s a conductor and composer - a maestro - who claims Leonard Bernstein as her mentor and whose career has been a steady ascent through the great orchestras of Cleveland, Boston and New York to her current perch at the Berlin Philharmonic. Lydia’s résumé is a litany of meritocratic glory and upper-middlebrow glitter so lustrous as to verge on satire. Gopnik’s introductory remarks provide a Wikipedia-style summary with a bit of Talk of the Town filigree, establishing that this is a person who surely needs no introduction. She is introduced to us by the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, humbly playing himself as he interviews Lydia, regally played by Cate Blanchett, on a Manhattan stage. Her name is Lydia Tár, and in the world Field has imagined - one that exists at an oblique angle to our own - it’s a household name. Whose hands? That question will turn out to be relevant to the plot, but for the moment it is overwhelmed by the mystique of the page’s subject, who is also the protagonist of Todd Field’s cruelly elegant, elegantly cruel new film. Early in “Tár” there is a shot of a Wikipedia entry being edited by unseen hands.
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