Film Review: Cate Blanchett shines in Tár

Tár is really a story about what happens when a self-created idol is obliged to acknowledge her feet of clay

Cate Blanchett in Tár

★★★★☆

The fact that the renowned composer-conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is preparing to record Mahler’s fifth symphony as Tár (15A) opens is something of a musical in-joke. The fifth symphony was where Mahler fully embraced counterpoint; Lydia, cresting a creative wave that promises to cement her already formidable reputation, is horrified when she realises that her sordid past is about to come crashing back into her life, disrupting her domestic relationship with her wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) and, professionally, loosening her iron grip on her Berlin orchestra.

Blanchett is suitably imperious as ‘the greatest living composer’, a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, and a woman who has single-handedly rewritten the handbook for female conductors. But while Blanchett could probably play a tyrant in her sleep, Tár — written and directed by Todd Field — is really a story about what happens when a self-created idol is obliged to acknowledge her feet of clay.

Blanchett could probably play a tyrant in her sleep

It’s here that Blanchett truly shines: as the cracks begin to appear in the façade, and Lydia grows ever more desperate in attempting to cover the tracks of those ‘transactional relationships’ that have ended in tragedy, the film explores the extent to which the private life defines the public artist, and how inner conflicts emerge in the artist’s work — that Lydia’s guilty conscience manifests itself by way of tormenting dissonant sounds is an apt variation on Lady Macbeth’s damned spot.

Blanchett, already a winner of the Best Actress award for this role at the Venice Film Festival, seems a shoo-in for an eighth Oscar nomination, and she gets very strong support from Nina Hoss as Lydia’s long-suffering partner, Noémi Merlant as Lydia’s demoralised assistant, and Mark Strong as a sycophantic fellow conductor who fawns on Lydia even as he plots her downfall.

The soundtrack features Mahler and Bach, British cellist Sophie Kauer (playing Russian cellist Olga Metkina) contributes Elgar’s concerto, and Hildur Gudnadóttir (Joker) delivers a superb original score.

(cinema release)