Tár | Review

Many people have labelled Tár “a film about cancel culture”. I did not come away with that reading. Really, what I think it’s about is institutional power, and the way it can permeate and consume the people who hold it. A friend of mine told me she didn’t find that the film adequately addressed its choice for Lydia Tár to be a woman, who occupies a position of abuse so regularly taken up by men. However, I feel that the abuse of power knows no gender. The reason we see men abuse their power so frequently is because they are the holders of almost all cultural apparatuses.

Tár is, by all accounts, an excellent film. While I do think it could have stood for some editing (can we please stop with the 2.5 hour burns?), this subtle thriller unfurls slowly and seductively. It puts its audience through a near-20 minute scene of Lydia waxing poetic for a New Yorker interview, demonstrating the sheer self-aggrandizement of the art institution. The person I watched this film with had a very interesting take on this scene - that Lydia is simply a shill for the classical music institution to prop up and construct narratives about. When her narrative no longer fits their objectives, they discard her. I took away from this that Lydia, as many men before her, has formed a cult of personality around herself. She participates in the narrative-making process by self-mythologizing and lying to get ahead. This cult of personality has made it so that she is able to wield absolute power over her instrumentalists. Her charm and gender allows this power to be perceived as soft, when the dynamic of the institution is much more akin to a dictatorship.

I wholly expect Cate Blanchett to win an Oscar for this film. Her talent lends itself to what is a very difficult, intricate, and lengthy character study about a woman’s fall from grace. The series of emotions and thoughts that run across Blanchett’s face as she prepares to run onstage and topple her successor will alone make it to the books. 

I think it’s a disservice to Tár to whittle it down to a commentary on cancel culture - in fact, the scene with the Juilliard student I thought was the weakest aspect of it. I understood it as a parable for power and a study of the type of person who is able to grab ahold of it - a person who is willing to threaten someone else's child in a school yard, or lie about being attacked to avoid mundanity. Tár is exactly the kind of character-driven filmmaking that is sadly missing from our current film climate. I thoroughly enjoyed it.