tar It is one of the best films released so far this 2023 in Argentina, which worries and challenges the viewer, and was also one of those that competed for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2022, where it was Argentina, 1985.
Todd Field, an actor turned director, who has only three films as a director to his credit (In the bedroom, intimate secrets AND tar) is an inspiring and innovative guy. Not many will dare to start the screening of their film with the credits – long – in small white and on a black background. And not many would put the scene with which he decides to open the film as first.
Lydia Tár is seated comfortably in an armchair on a theater stage, being interviewed in front of a packed audience. Lydia is a famous and successful conductor, almost a rock star in the world of cultured music. And Field, who wrote the screenplay -which is also nominated for an Oscar, like the film, directed and Cate Blanchett– dedicates that first sequence to a long academic dialogue.
Lydia and the reporter talk at length about what it means to conduct an orchestra. They talk about times. They mention specific authors and works. They dialogue, discuss and comment on situations, all with the actress from Blue jasmine speaking fluently, dominating the scene.
And this. From that scene we understand the character, and in the almost two hours and 40 minutes that the film lasts, the director will dedicate himself to recounting the crisis that Tár is going through and the one he is going through.
Her colleagues call her “teacher”. It wasn’t easy for Lydia: her dream was to get where she is -after having been through so many others-, directing the Berlin Orchestra. Demanding and despotic, married to the orchestra’s first violinist (the German Nina Hoss), they have one daughter. And revealing her sexual status at the time wasn’t easy for him either.
obsession and debacle
But in the face of so much success, something begins to cloud his life. She begins to have insomnia. Lydia, who is American but fluent in German, runs a scholarship program for women. It’s run by a mediocre aspiring director (Mark Strong), and the suicide of one of them, obsessed with Tár, leads from one thing to another.
tarthe film goes beyond simple erasure, a recurring theme in recent cinema, but at the same time encourages questioning a woman as a probable molester.
Blanchett is brilliant on every occasion. She could try her musicians and give herself with passion and vehemence, with the same intensity with which she would face a girl who bullies her daughter. Lydia is also a blatant manipulator, a woman who has built a character and the film depicts her collapse in a no less terrible way. Both personally and artistically.
There are stronger characters, different women – even Lydia’s assistant wants to be a director (the French Noémie Merlant, from Portrait of a woman on fire); a young Russian cellist (English actress and musical artist Sophie Kauer) – and a devastating ending, which hits you in the middle of the stomach.
A great film that must be seen with an open mind, to dive headlong.
“tar”
Drama. United States, 2022. 158′, SAM 13. From: Camp Todd. With: Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong. Rooms: Hoyts Abasto and Dot, Cinemark Palermo, Cinépolis Recoleta and Pilar, Showcase Belgrano and Norcenter.
Source: Clarin
