Tár Movie | Classic Music, Drama, Biographical Content This Movie 2022

Having achieved an enviable career few could even dream of, renowned conductor/composer Lydia Tár, the first female principal music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, is at the top of her game. As a conductor, Lydia not only orchestrates, she manipulates. As a trailblazer, the passionate virtuoso leads the way in the male-dominated classical music industry. Moreover, Lydia prepares for the release of her memoir while juggling work and family.

She is also willing to take up one of her most significant challenges: a live recording of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. However, forces that even the imperious maestro can’t control slowly chip away at Lydia’s elaborate facade, revealing the genius’s dirty secrets and the insidious, corrosive nature of power. What if life knocks Lydia off her pedestal?

“TÁR” is a provocation

Full of slow-motion sucker-punches and the driest of laughs (even its accented title is a knowingly pretentious in-joke) and yet Field seems as uninterested in trolling his liberal audience as he is in patronizing them. That sounds like a tough needle to thread for a film so micro-targeted that it opens with a long, long scene of its subject onstage for an expository conversation with The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, who needs no introduction.

The movie is breathtaking

In its drama, its high-crafted innovation, and its vision. It’s a ruthless but intimate tale of art, lust, obsession, and power. It’s set in the contemporary classical-music world, and if that sounds a bit high-toned (it is, in a good way), the movie leads us through that world in a manner that’s so rigorously precise and authentic and detailed that it generates the immersion of a thriller. The characters in “Tár” feel as real as life. (They’re acted to richly draw perfection down to the smallest role.) You believe, at every moment, in the reality, you’re seeing, and it’s extraordinary how that raises the stakes.

2023 Oscars goes to Cate Blanchett

It’s hard not to impress and be mesmerized by Cate Blanchett in any movie. She has such indomitable presence and grace that’s hard to ignore, even to individuals who may not know her.

In this exceptional character study, Todd field has elevated the direction and screenplay of this fictional character Lydia Tar. It almost feels like she might be based on a real person but she’s not. The film is also about being an artist and power dynamics. Such a nuanced approach.

Of course, the film would not have been this way if it hadn’t for Ms. Blanchett’s impeccable performance. I think she has even elevated the previous work by playing this character. Career best.