Female Film Critics 24/375
Cate Blanchett delivers a powerhouse performance as an acclaimed concert conductor/composer in Todd Fields’ revelatory Tar. Our first glimpse of Lydia Tar (Blanchett) is a tall, slim, confident woman, stylishly dressed in a black suit and crisp white shirt, luxuriating in her celebrity while preparing to take the stage in Manhattan for a New Yorker talk with writer Adam Gropnik (as himself).
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Writer/director Todd Field’s captivating TÁR opens with real “New Yorker” writer Adam Gopnik in an extended Manhattan stage interview with the fictional Lydia Tár. This establishes her career highlights as well as her emphatically egotistical persona, anticipating what follows in Lydia’s personal and professional life as the first conductor for the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic preparing to record Mahler’s fifth symphony.
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Cate Blanchett IS Lydia Tár. The Oscar winning actress gives a masterclass interpretation of a masterclass musician. A devious bully that beats to her own metronome. Blanchett, who switches from English to German flawlessly, not only learned to play several instruments for the role, but she did her own conducting, twirling the orchestra baton like a musical majorette. Blanchett is better than the movie, though.
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Over Labor Day weekend, the 49th Telluride Film Festival presented thought-provoking films to its full complement of attendees, a nice rebound from the all-mask 2021 event. As always, no one could come close to seeing all the enticing films on offer, so tough choices and constant second guessing rules. This year women directed and dominated exceptionally strong selections that tell stories of quite different time periods and subjects. Intelligently and insightfully observing internal and external struggles, revealing the specificity of contemporary and historical pressures (so remarkably relevant today), the fest’s films reached out and inspired as they informed. We are, indeed, a global community.
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In TÁR, writer, director and producer Todd Field (In The Bedroom) provides us with the character study of a brilliant, pretentious, cruel genius who gets no redemption by the time the credits roll. Is the filmmaker making a point about the nature of art, talent and creativity? Is he showing us a successful woman who just so happens to be a horrible person and asking us if we’d judge her as harshly if she were a man? Or is he turning the tables on us, showing us that a sexual predator – which is arguably who Lydia Tár eventually turns out to be – doesn’t always look like what we’d expect them to be?
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My Little Sister, Switzerland’s entry for the foreign language Oscar category, ostensibly lets audiences peek inside the complex relationship between fraternal twins as one struggles with cancer. While that’s a poignant part of this tender drama, the film’s underlying story is more about how much the titular sister gives to everyone but herself.
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The old saying “still waters run deep” is an apt description of the main character in Ina Weisse’s intensely observed drama The Audition. Anna (Nina Hoss) is a wife, a mother, and a music teacher whose life might look calm and stable from the outside but whose inner life and conflicts threaten to boil over daily. Hoss’ magnetic performance will keep you invested in where Anna’s choices take her.
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The real conflict on screen exists inside of German actress Nina Hoss as the high-strung Anna. The Audition would be played in a minor key if it weren’t for Hoss’s well-modulated emotional outbursts and physical reactions. There is plenty of Bach to be heard on the soundtrack but film’s female star is the one who keeps everything in tune.
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