TÁR Review: Cate Blanchett Is Her Own Symphony In A Sublime, Unsettling Drama
Are all great artists necessarily great monsters, or have we just been telling ourselves that for too long? The vectors of ego, talent and personal responsibility collide in Todd Field's TÁR, an impressive monolithic film based on Cate Blanchett's extraordinary and devastating performance. She is Lydia Tarr, cuyo éxito le ha valido un Raro hidden culture para una directora de music classica: la gente paga solo para verla hablar sobre su EGOT o sus pensamientos sobre Mahler, y magnate y groupies of ojos saltones compiten por el placer de su Company . His world consists of the Gulf Stream and quiet hotel suites and a kind of austere, understated luxury (I guess the devil wears Margiela). There's always one more prestigious stock to unlock or a course to teach at Juilliard, plus Francesco's trusty assistant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Noemi Merlan) to smooth the details and cut the froth
Lydia also has a partner, Sharon (the wonderful German actress Nina Hoss), and a young daughter in Berlin, where she directs the city's world-class orchestra. Her home life, marred by her posh townhouse and the minutiae of internal office politics (Sharon is also her lead violinist), contains a certain caveat: pills that Lydia urgently swallows when no one is around and watching. they belong to him, and his interest in a new cellist, the feisty Russian Olga (Sophie Kauer), seems far from professional. In fact, she has a habit of paying attention to attractive young women in the industry and reaping that love in a way that doesn't always end well.
However, any damage he leaves behind tends to be drowned out or lost in the white noise of his glory. And also out of sheer willpower: Lydia, with her dark blond hair slicked back like a lion's mane and the presence of the center of gravity of every room she enters, embodies the role of teacher so completely that it's difficult. once an infant or even a small child; instead, it could have come fully formed from the forehead of Leonard Bernstein (of course she knew "Lenny," the teacher).
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But when one of her former students commits suicide, questions of guilt and inappropriate intimacy begin to boil over, and Francesca and the orchestra's press office can no longer contain it. These are the general outlines of TÁR, although what happens over the course of the film's nearly two hours and 40 minutes defies almost any easy summary. Much of the first 15 minutes takes place in a staged interview between Lydia and New York journalist Adam Gopnik, which in a way is like a pressure test: will it survive the next few hours. with this person who is so polite, so arrogant, so lost in his own monologue. But Lydia Tarr, like all public figures, is a construct, and the rest of the film is the violent collapse, if not complete destruction, of this carefully constructed edifice.
Field, whose two previous films, In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2006) earned a total of eight Oscar nominations, took 16 years to make TÁR, and it feels like a major undertaking. The script is so masterfully crafted and Lydia's world so fully and instinctively realized that the film becomes something of a deep dive; Whatever the opposite of a sensory deprivation tank is, that's it. The supporting cast is also excellent: Mark Strong as the co-director, who struggles with Lydia's temper and is covered in it like a balm; Francesca de Merlan, whose devotion and devotion to her Master absorbed almost all her own dreams; Hoss does more with the eyes in a devastating scene than most actors can do with their entire toolbox.
But the film belongs to Blanchett, again so refined and expansive that it feels less like a performance and more like a full-body obsession. The fact that he often speaks German fluently in the film and, among other things, plays the piano professionally (if you look at his behavior, it seems that lightning can fly from the tips of his fingers) is very impressive. But Lydia is not a collection of tricksters and idiots; She is a superstar and a virtuoso who may have forgotten that she is also human and that the message reaches us all. class a
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