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"TAR" redirects here. For other uses, see Tar (disambiguation).

Tár
Theatrical release poster
Directed byTodd Field
Written byTodd Field
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyFlorian Hoffmeister
Edited byMonika Willi
Music byHildur Guðnadóttir
Production
companies
  • Standard Film Company
  • EMJAG Productions
Distributed by
Release dates
  • September 1, 2022 (2022-09-01) (Venice)
  • October 7, 2022 (2022-10-07) (United States)
  • February 23, 2023 (2023-02-23) (Germany)
Running time
158 minutes
Countries
  • United States
  • Germany
Languages
  • English
  • German
  • French
  • Tagalog
Budget$35 million
Box office$10 million[1][2]

Tár is a 2022 psychological drama film written and directed by Todd Field and starring Cate Blanchett. The film follows fictional composer and conductor Lydia Tár. The supporting cast includes Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, and Mark Strong. Tár premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival in September 2022, where Blanchett won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. The film had a limited theatrical release in the United States on October 7, 2022, before a wide release on October 28, by Focus Features.[3]

Tár was selected Best Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, becoming only the seventh film in history named as such from the nation's top critics' groups, the so-called "trifecta".[4]

Tár was named Best Picture of the Year by more critics than any other film released in 2022 — among others: Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Daily Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily, Entertainment Weekly, and IndieWire's annual poll of 136 critics worldwide.[5][6] The American Film Institute named it one of the top 10 films of the year.

At the 80th Golden Globe Awards, Blanchett won Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, while the film was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Screenplay. At the 28th Critics Choice Awards, Blanchett won Best Actress, and Guðnadóttir won Best Score. For the 76th British Academy Film Awards, the film received five nominations.

At the 95th Academy Awards, Tár received six nominations: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Field, Best Actress for Blanchett, as well as Best Cinematography and Best Editing.

Plot

Mahler Symphony No. 5, I. Trauermarsch; the movement that Lydia is primarily concerned with conducting throughout the film, its opening acting as a backdrop for the film's climactic moments.

Lydia Tár is an American pianist, ethnomusicologist, composer, and the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. During an interview at The New Yorker Festival, she promotes several new projects, including her upcoming live recording of Mahler's Fifth Symphony and new book Tár on Tár. She relies on Francesca, her personal assistant and ex-paramour, and Sharon, her wife and concertmaster. Lydia lunches with Eliot Kaplan,[a] an investment banker and amateur conductor who co-founded the Accordion Foundation with Lydia to support aspiring female conductors. They discuss technique, replacing Lydia's assistant conductor Sebastian, and filling a vacant cello position in Berlin.

Lydia guest-teaches a masterclass at the Juilliard School. She challenges a BIPOC pangender student for not taking interest in white cisgender composers like J. S. Bach,[8] encouraging students to look past superficial differences and focus on the music itself. Before returning to Berlin, Lydia receives a first edition of Vita Sackville-West's novel Challenge from Krista Taylor, a former Accordion fellow. Dream sequences and e-mails suggest Lydia and Krista were in a sexually transactional relationship that went sour, with Krista becoming erratic after Lydia blacklisted her from various orchestras.

Before a blind audition for the cello position, Lydia spots Russian hopeful Olga Metkina in the bathroom. Attracted to Olga, Lydia secures her favors, such as changing her scorecard to ensure a spot in the orchestra and granting a plum soloist position in the companion piece to Mahler's Fifth, Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto. As Lydia prepares for the recording, her relationships with Francesca and Sharon grow strained, as both recognize her attraction to Olga.

After sending increasingly alarming emails to Francesca, Krista commits suicide and Lydia instructs Francesca to delete any correspondence from or about Krista. Lydia also retains a lawyer, as Krista's parents plan to sue. Lydia informs Sebastian of his imminent replacement. Incensed, he indicates the orchestra is aware of her favoritism, and that it suggests abusive behavior toward young women. He speculates Francesca will be his replacement, implying an exchange of sexual favors. Unnerved by the accusations, Lydia plans to replace Sebastian with a different candidate. Without telling Lydia, Francesca resigns upon learning she will not be promoted and sabotages Lydia’s calendar.

Lydia is haunted by screaming women in the distance, nightmares, chronic pain, an increasing sensitivity to sound, and enigmatic scribbles resembling those Krista once made. While trying to complete a new composition, she is continually disturbed by the sound of a medical-alert device next door, where her erratic neighbor is caring for her dying mother. One day after rehearsing Olga's solo, Lydia drives Olga home and follows her into an abandoned, dilapidated apartment complex. Frightened by a dog in the basement, Lydia trips and injures herself. She lies to Sharon and the orchestra, claiming the injuries were from an assault.

An edited, out-of-context video of Lydia's Juilliard class goes viral, and an article with predatory accusations against her appears in the New York Post. Lydia, accompanied by Olga, returns to New York to attend a deposition for the lawsuit of Krista's parents and to promote her book, where she is met by protestors. During the deposition, it is implied that Francesca has shared incriminating emails with the plaintiffs.

Back in Berlin, Lydia is removed as conductor due to the controversy. Furious over the allegations and Lydia's lack of communication, Sharon bars Lydia from seeing their daughter Petra. Lydia retreats to her old studio and grows increasingly depressed and deranged. She sneaks into the live recording of Mahler's Fifth and violently assaults her replacement, Eliot. Advised to lie low by her management agency, she returns to her working-class childhood home on Staten Island, where certificates of achievement reveal that her birth name is Linda Tarr. She tearfully watches an old tape of Leonard Bernstein's first episode of Young People's Concerts, "What Does Music Mean?"[9] Her brother Tony comes home and admonishes her for forgetting her roots.

Sometime later, Lydia finds tedious and professionally undemanding work conducting in the Philippines.[10] Seeking a massage to ease her jetlag, she asks the hotel concierge for a recommendation. She is sent to a high-end brothel, where she is directed to select an escort from the "fishbowl," where numerous young women in numbered robes are seated in a chamber-orchestra-like arrangement. One woman looks up into Lydia's eyes, her robe the number 5, the same number as the important symphony Lydia couldn't conduct and her position the same as Olga's, and Lydia rushes outside to vomit. With her new orchestra, Lydia conducts the score for the video game series Monster Hunter in front of an audience of cosplayers.

Cast

  • Cate Blanchett as Linda Tarr/Lydia Tár, a world-famous composer-conductor[11]
  • Nina Hoss as Sharon Goodnow, a concertmaster and Lydia's wife[12]
  • Noémie Merlant as Francesca Lentini, Lydia's assistant[13]
  • Sophie Kauer as Olga Metkina, a young Russian cellist[14]
  • Julian Glover as Andris Davis, Lydia's predecessor
  • Allan Corduner as Sebastian Brix, Lydia's assistant conductor
  • Mark Strong as Eliot Kaplan, an investment banker, amateur conductor, and manager of Lydia's fellowship program
  • Sylvia Flote as Krista Taylor, a former member of Lydia's conducting fellowship program
  • Adam Gopnik as himself, the interviewer of Lydia at The New Yorker Festival
  • Mila Bogojevic as Petra, Lydia and Sharon's adopted daughter
  • Zethphan Smith-Gneist as Max, a Juilliard student[15]
  • Lee Sellars as Tony Tarr, Linda/Lydia's brother

Production

Writer and director Todd Field and lead actress and executive producer Cate Blanchett

It was announced in April 2021 that Cate Blanchett would star in and executive-produce the film, which would be written and directed by Todd Field.[16][17] In a statement accompanying the teaser trailer in August 2022, Field said that he wrote the script specifically for Blanchett, and that if she had said no, "[it] would have never seen the light of day."[18]

The Dresden Philharmonic was used as a stand-in for Lydia Tár's fictitious Berlin orchestra.

In September 2021, Nina Hoss and Noémie Merlant joined the cast, and Hildur Guðnadóttir became the film's composer.[19]

Filming began in August 2021 in Berlin.[20] In an interview with The Guardian in October, Mark Strong revealed that he had finished filming scenes for the film.[21] In November, it was reported that Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner and Sylvia Flote had joined the cast.[3] (Kauer is a British-German classical cellist who studied at the Royal Academy of Music.)[22] All diegetic music was recorded live on-set, including Blanchett's piano playing, Kauer's cello, and the Dresden Philharmonic's performances.[23][24]

Release

Tár premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on September 1, 2022,[25] and had its first North American screening at the Telluride Film Festival on September 3, 2022.[26] It had a limited theatrical release on October 7, 2022, then expanded to wide release on October 28.[27][3]

Home media

The film was released for VOD on November 15, 2022, and on Blu-ray, DVD and 4K UHD on December 20, 2022, by Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.[28]

Music

Main article: Tár (Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture)

A concept album was released on October 21, 2022, featuring Guðnadóttir's score with the London Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Robert Ames, as well as a rehearsal of Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony with Blanchett conducting the Dresden Philharmonic. Cellist Sophie Kauer is also heard on the album playing Elgar's Cello Concerto, backed by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Natalie Murray Beale.[29] For the week ending November 5, 2022, the Tár concept album topped Billboard magazine's Traditional Classical Albums at number one, ahead of albums by the actual Berlin Philharmonic.[30]

John Mauceri served as consultant on Field's script, specifically helping inform the tenor and accuracy of Lydia Tár's comments on classical music and musicians.[31]

Reception

Box office

The film, still in general release, has to date made $10 million.[32] In the United States and Canada, it made $158,620 from four theaters in its opening weekend. The $39,655 per-screen average was the second highest of 2022 for a limited release. In its second weekend the film made $330,030 from 36 theaters. In its third weekend it made $500,035 from 141 theaters, and there was speculation in the trades that Tár was an example that there was still a place for "adult-minded fare." [33][34][35] However, once Tár expanded to 1,087 theaters in its fourth weekend, leaving the limited specialty house run for the multiplex, it made only $1.02 million, finishing 10th.[36] In its second week of wide release, it made $729,605 (marking a drop of 30%).[37] Some commentators attributed the poor U.S. domestic box office performance to the film's subject matter alienating a general audience,[8] while others noted a larger trend in U.S. domestic art houses, 40% of which had permanently shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling to regain their core 40-70 year-old audience, an audience more prone to health concerns and still hesitant to return to the cinema.[38][39] The New York Times estimated the budget of the film "plus marketing costs" at $35 million and argued that Tár and similar highbrow films "failed to find an audience big enough to justify their costs".[40] The film has performed better in the UK, Australia, France and Spain, and will be released in other international territories in the months ahead.[41]

Critical response

Tár was met with widespread critical acclaim upon release. On Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of 306 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's consensus reads, "Led by the soaring melody of Cate Blanchett's note-perfect performance, Tár riffs brilliantly on the discordant side of fame-fueled power."[42] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 92 out of 100, based on 59 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[43] Audiences surveyed by PostTrak gave the film an overall positive score of 72%, with 42% saying they would definitely recommend it.[36]

Owen Gleiberman in his Venice Film Festival Daily Variety review wrote

Let me say right up front: It’s the work of a master filmmaker... Field’s script is dazzling in its conversational flow, its insider dexterity, its perception of how power in the world actually works... Tár is not a judgement so much as a statement you can make your own judgment about. The statement is: We’re in a new world.[44]

A. O. Scott of The New York Times writing from the Telluride Film Festival and later from the New York Film Festival stated,

I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie quite like Tár. Field balances Apollonian restraint with Dionysian frenzy. Tár is meticulously controlled and also scarily wild. Field finds a new way of posing the perennial question about separating the artist from the art, a question that he suggests can only be answered by another question: are you crazy? We don't care about Tár because she's an artist. We care about her because she's art.[45][46]

Justin Chang for the Los Angeles Times regarded the film as "both a superb character study and a highly persuasive piece of world building", stating that the director's "storytelling draws no artificial distinction between the big and the small, the important and the mundane; everything we see and hear matters".[47] Chang later ranked Tár as the #1 Academy Awards Best Picture nominee for 2023:

... there is nothing rigid about the ideas swirling through those spaces [in the film]: about cancel culture and #MeToo, about the Western canon and the artistically marginalized, about the corruptions of power and the irreducible nature of great art. Tár is irreducible, and it is great.[48]

Reviewing the film for The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney wrote: "Tár marks yet another career peak for Blanchett—many are likely to argue her greatest—and a fervent reason to hope it's not sixteen more years before Field gives us another feature. It's a work of genius."[49]

Richard Brody of The New Yorker, however, described Tár as "a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics" and laments Field's "absence of style" in filming the music. He accuses the film of "conservative button-pushing" with a regressive, conservative and narrow aesthetic, failing to achieve dramatic unity.[50]

Tár was listed on the American Film Institute's top 10 films of the year, and named best film of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, becoming the seventh film in history to win top honors from the critics' trifecta.[4] Tár was also named the best film of 2022 from among others Vanity Fair, Daily Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Atlantic, Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, [51] and IndieWire's annual poll of 165 critics worldwide.[52]

Year-end lists

The below is a sampling of Best Films of 2022 critics lists.[53]

Accolades

Main article: List of accolades received by Tár

Reactions

Former president Barack Obama listed Tár as one his Top Movies of 2022.[54][55]

Martin Scorsese presenting Best Film of the Year to Field at the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, praised Field's filmmaking saying,

For so long now, so many of us see films that pretty much let us know where they're going... I mean, they take us by the hand and, even if it's disturbing at times, sort of comfort us along the way that it will be all okay by the end. Now this is insidious, as one can get lulled into this and ultimately get used to it, leading those of us who've experienced cinema in the past – as much more than that – to become despairing of the future of the art form, especially for younger generations. But that's on dark days. The clouds lifted when I experienced Todd's film, Tár. What you've done, Todd – is that the very fabric of the movie you created doesn't allow this. All the aspects of cinema and the film that you've used, attest to this. The shift in locations for example, the shift in locations alone do what cinema does best, which is to reduce space and time to what they are, which is nothing... all of this is conveyed through a masterful mise-en-scène, as controlled, precise, dangerous, precipitous angles and edges geometrically kind of chiseled into a wonderful 2:3:5 aspect ratio of frame compositions. The limits of the frame itself, and the provocation of measured long takes all reflecting the brutal architecture of her soul – Tár's soul.[56]

In an interview with The Sunday Times, conductor Marin Alsop shared her dislike of the film, calling it "anti-woman", saying "I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian. To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser – for me that was heartbreaking."[57] In response, Blanchett told BBC Radio 4, the film was a "meditation on power, and power is genderless", and that while her character shares similarities with Alsop, it is a complete work of fiction.[58] Alsop herself is mentioned reverently by Lydia Tár in the first scene of the film.

In The Guardian, conductor Alice Farnham thanked Blanchett, Field, and the film for "taking up the baton for female conductors," and for normalising their image.[59] Critic Emily Bootle also defended the film in the i (newspaper) writing: "This is a film about power: how it's used and abused, its importance and its tragedy. But power is not a straightforward topic... While the film has provoked a storm of criticism and praise since its UK release last week – it offended the prominent woman conductor Marin Alsop... it's not a film that readily invites viewers to come down on either side of anything. Its overarching message is not that cancel culture will come for us all, or that women can be abusers too, or that we should separate the art from the artist, or that we shouldn't. It's that sometimes we have to tolerate grey areas."[60] Film critics Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo also disagreed with the interpretation that Tár is "anti-woman."[61]

Music professor Ian Pace discussed the issue further in The Conversation: "It would be rash to assume that such a figure could never act in a predatory and exploitative manner. This is not just an issue of identity, but power and the opportunities it provides for the reckless."[62] Conductor Don Baton (a pen name) in City Journal agreed: "We know very well that men and women have the potential to be great leaders, and that both are susceptible to the corruption that power brings. In elite society, however, statements that challenge the two assumptions tend to invite ridicule and even cancellation, so few mass-market films or theatrical works take the chance. This year, one has. Indeed, it's hard to think of any recent work of art or literature that has challenged these two assumptions more thoroughly and thoughtfully than the psychological thriller Tár..."[63]

Film critic John McDonald for the Australian Financial Review wrote: "Had it been a male conductor, the story would have been a cliché. Had it been a celebration of female power, it would have been no less superficial... Field has taken the 'Maestro myth' that portrays the conductor as a kind of hypermale and shown that the same issues may apply to a woman. Tár is a universal fable about power applied to a specifically gendered case, about the way it corrodes our ideals and fantasies. It’s a timely reminder that those superheroes we put on pedestals are human, all too human."[64][65] Several other conductors and musicians wrote in defense of the film.[66] Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, Director of Research for the Oxford Conducting Institute, shared research suggesting members of self-governing orchestras have higher job satisfaction than those in other types of orchestras.[relevant?][67] However, contrary to Ponchione-Bailey's nominal claim, the main character's fall from grace would suggest criticism of the 'Maestro myth', showing the true limits of Tár's power over herself and others.[original research]

In her critique for The New York Review of Books titled "The Instrumentalist," prize-winning novelist and professor Zadie Smith commended Cate Blanchett's performance, writing "Blanchett's characterization of this Lydia Tár proves so thorough, so multifaceted in its dimensions, so believable, that it defies even the film's most programmatic intentions and has reportedly sent many a young person to googling: Is Lydia Tár a real person? She is not one in the eyes of the algorithm, but she certainly is in mine."[68]

The classroom scene at The Juilliard School became one of the most talked-about from the film. Described by A. O. Scott as "a mini-course in the dos and don'ts of contemporary pedagogy," the scene represents both sides of recent debates in higher education—and American culture more broadly—concerning identity politics, the Western canon, and calls for diversifying school curriculums.[69] Neville Naidoo for MovieWeb described the scene as,

A realistically familiar trope found in modern colleges — a student's rejection of a traditional figurehead that clashes with the accepted dogmas of their generation... By delving into such an edgy scene with seemingly unabashed candor (and patient but intense camerawork which rarely cuts for an edit), the film evokes a political discourse that few major players in the industry would willfully tackle head on. Not only does the scene open up a dialogue that often polarizes opinion, its true genius subsists in the fact that it manages to achieve this while remaining subtly noncommittal to a particular stance on either side of that dialogue... Wokeness and cancel culture have at times spawned ideologies that became synonymous with intolerance for opposing viewpoints... it forces viewers to keep an open mind by presenting both sides of the ideological divide without ever outwardly demonizing either... the film paints a disturbingly realistic picture of where society is at the moment..."[70]

Tár found resonance on college campuses, receiving positive reviews from student newspapers including The Harvard Crimson, The Dartmouth Review, Washington Square News, The Michigan Daily, and Her Campus.[71][72][73][74][75] The ontology of Lydia Tár, and Lydia Tár—the fictional character—became memes on social media.[76][77][78]

While a number of post-MeToo movement films have depicted rather dichotomous, clear victims and perpetrators, Tár has been appreciated for its use of narrative ambiguity, breaking out of the agonistic structure that would oversimplify dramatic events, our perceptions of the characters, and expect all viewers to respond in the same way.[79][80][81][82] Critic Amanda Hess wrote in The New York Times, "The online cancellation of an artistic giant can be a tedious subject, but in Tár, it acquires sneaky complications... Tár offers up a work into which we can sublimate our own Schadenfreude and sympathy for abusers. Thanks to Blanchett's luminous performance and Field's puzzle-box storytelling, we are freed to obsess."[83]

Tár has been described as a cautionary tale for the post-MeToo movement era. A.A. Dowd in The Houston Chronicle wrote,

This is, on some level, a drama of generational sea change. The real terror of #MeToo, for dinosaurs used to taking whatever (and whoever) they wanted as the spoils of their supposed genius, is the fear that the world has fundamentally changed to reject this unspoken agreement. It's for more than mere provocation that Field has swapped the gender of an all-too-familiar scandal. He's after another irony still. More than just the art of conducting, Lydia has mastered the transactional politics of her field, and rose to the top of a discipline by playing by the time-honored rules of the men that have traditionally dominated it. The trajectory of the plot is a realization that she's achieved equality of accountability, too: Being a woman will not shelter her from the consequences of her own abuses of power.[84]

Conversely, Film critic and professor Howie Movshovitz argued,

Filmmaker Todd Field has made the character's identity and all the unyielding social attitudes we tend to bring to movies in recent years nearly irrelevant. The social world may matter, and viewers may well bring current questions of identity and approved behavior to their viewing of the movie, but the film Tár has a kind of resistant purity. The film demands that people see this one character as herself, not as a representative of anything. Just herself, along with the questions that arise from watching, in action, a mesmerizing, brilliant and hard person.[85]

Writing for Time, Stephanie Zacharek states,

Blanchett plays a woman who knows what she was born to do, and the thrill of it sets her eyes ablaze. Tár doesn't offer anything as comfortable as redemption, and it asks us to fall in love, at least a little, with a tyrant. But how often do we see women portrayed this way, as magnificent rather than admirable? Lydia Tár is the antithesis of tote-bag feminism, not least because she knows that the power of a question is greater than that of a slogan.[86]

Similarly, Wendy Ide in The Guardian wrote,

The genius of Todd Field's superb Tár comes from the way the film-making echoes the treacherously seductive and mercurial nature of its central character. Lydia Tár (an electrifying Cate Blanchett) is a dazzling talent: a world-class conductor and composer with a towering ego to match her formidable professional reputation... Tár is magnificent.[87]

Bloomberg's Esther Zuckerman concurred,

Tár reestablishes Todd Field as "a major voice in American cinema... it's a jagged, uncomfortable masterpiece.[88]

Refining his first impressions of the film, The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that a "second viewing has swept away – with hurricane force – the obtuse worries I had at the Venice film festival about [Tár], the orchestra conductor starting to unravel and unhinge." Despite "misgivings then about the climactic element of melodrama – which I now see as a deliberate and brilliant stab of dissonance, brilliantly cueing up the film's deeply mysterious and surreal final section," he argues. "No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany... Her performance will pierce you like a conductor's baton through the heart..."[89]

Murtada Elfadl wrote for The A.V. Club "In a great role that might come rarely even for an actor of her stature, Blanchett ferociously tears into this extraordinary—and presumably extraordinarily challenging opportunity... Blanchett is utterly bewitching... Tár does not tell us what to think of Lydia. She's the central character, though the film is not told from, or arguing for, anybody's point of view. It's a fly on the wall, offering no comment but observing the proceedings with a merciless detachment. And after an exhilarating 157 minutes, its grip feels less like a quagmire than a beautifully unanswered question—a symphony we've been equipped to understand, but which refuses to supply a definitive interpretation."[90]

Critic and essayist Philippa Snow in ArtReview said,

Field's elegant, sometimes spooky, often very funny portrait of a genius in decline is in my estimation a genuine masterpiece, blending pianissimo human drama with bombastic, gothic touches of the implied supernatural... With a lesser film, I might have let my inability to pin down exactly what was being said about the interplay between power and gender get the better of me, and I might have seen the work as incomplete.

Here, I simply let the mystery be, trusting that Tár did not need to have a perfect message to provide me with what turned out to be a more-or-less-perfect cinematic experience. In this regard, an ambiguous film of such quality can provide the viewer with a similar opportunity to the one Lydia describes when she refers to reinterpreting a score in accordance with a mood, the story altering as the person who translates it teases out their chosen meaning – a love song played as a fugue; a concerto reimagined as a weapon of seduction; a life story that shifts tempo, suddenly prestissimo, to become a hysterical ghost story, instead.[91]

Murielle Joudet wrote in Le Monde,

Tár "poetically captures the spirit of our time and draws from it a new way of storytelling. Above all, it leaves viewers alone, free to make their own opinions and to lose their bearings without knowing what the next scene will be. This type of wandering is a gift that has become too rare in cinema... Tár is a conceptual character made in our image. The world is no longer a plot that we share, but a kind of persistent tinnitus into which the heroine will end up disappearing.[92]

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that Tár is "a film about cancel culture, making it the rare piece of art that looks squarely at this social phenomenon that has roiled so many of America's meaning-making institutions... Tár demonstrates that all this flux and uncertainty is very fertile territory for art. Hopefully its success – many are predicting it will win a Best Picture Oscar – will encourage others to take on similarly thorny and unsettled issues. Hysteria about cancel culture can encourage artistic timidity by overstating the cost of probing taboos. In truth, there's a hunger out there for work that takes the strangeness of this time and turns it into something that transcends polemic."[93]

Notes

  1. ^ Eliot Kaplan has echoes of investment banker/occasional conductor Gilbert Kaplan.[7]

References

  1. ^ "Tár". Box Office Mojo. IMDb. Retrieved February 1, 2023.
  2. ^ "Tár". The Numbers. Nash Information Services, LLC. Retrieved February 1, 2023.
  3. ^ a b c D'Alessandro, Anthony (November 24, 2021). "Todd Field Cate Blanchett Movie Tár Sets 2022 Release & Adds Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong & More". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on June 1, 2022. Retrieved November 24, 2021.
  4. ^ a b Davis, Clayton (January 7, 2023). "Cate Blanchett, Ke Huy Quan and Tár Win National Society of Film Critics, Completing Rare Major Critics Awards Trifecta". Variety. Archived from the original on January 10, 2023. Retrieved January 10, 2023.
  5. ^ "Film Critics Pick 10 Best Movies of 2022". Retrieved December 28, 2022.
  6. ^ "The 50 Best Movies of 2022, According to 165 Critics from Around the World". Retrieved December 28, 2022.
  7. ^ McClintock, Pamela (November 12, 2022). "Making of Tár: How Director Todd Field Pushed His Creative Team to the Limit". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on November 15, 2022. Retrieved November 15, 2022.
  8. ^ a b Brooks, Xan (January 16, 2023). "Monstrous maestro: why is Cate Blanchett's cancel culture film Tár angering so many people?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on January 16, 2023. Retrieved January 16, 2023.
  9. ^ Bernstein, Leonard. "Young People's Concert: "What Does Music Mean?" (18 January 1958)". leonardbernstein.com (transcript). Archived from the original on December 25, 2022. Retrieved December 3, 2022.
  10. ^ Field, Todd (n.d.). Tár (PDF) (screenplay). pp. 88–92. Archived (PDF) from the original on January 5, 2023. Retrieved December 27, 2022. Also via Variety here Archived January 9, 2023, at the Wayback Machine.
  11. ^ Eng, Joyce (January 24, 2023). "Cate Blanchett joins elite group of 8-time Oscar nominees with Best Actress bid for 'TÁR'". Gold Derby. Archived from the original on January 24, 2023. Retrieved January 24, 2023. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; January 18, 2023 suggested (help)
  12. ^ Roxborough, Scott (December 8, 2022). "'Tár' Star Nina Hoss on Her Way into Her Character's Psyche: "She Enjoys the Power and the Privilege"". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on January 24, 2023. Retrieved January 24, 2023. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; January 18, 2023 suggested (help)
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