Noémie Merlant

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).

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.

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.

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?