

If we’re going to be tethered to Lydia’s perspective, to the point of ignoring and suppressing entire chapters of her history, then we’re certainly going to remain tethered to her in the private moments when the fear and paranoia of changing social tides might make her wonder whether her time is up. But there is something in her past, some interaction or relationship in particular she hopes to hide, whether by instructing Francesca to delete desperate emails she deems “strange,” or by spinning her own web about a former student she claims was “disturbed.”įield plays coy with the details at first, allowing them to largely manifest as dream sequences filmed as if through water, mysterious shapes that appear to Lydia like warnings or ciphers, and disembodied sounds whose sources she can’t seem to locate. He takes us on a tour of the maestro’s globetrotting personal life (she prefers the term to “maestra”), from her curt interactions with her diligent assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant), to her domestic life in Berlin with her adopted daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), and her violinist wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss) - the concertmaster at the Berlin orchestra she conducts full-time - to the guarded caution with which she responds to the advances of young female admirers.

With these questions posed, though by no means answered, Field ponders them in roundabout fashion. (At one point, a news article is dated November 2022 TÁR essentially takes place a month into the future).
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The point of these scenes is not to provide a definitive answer on how to approach the “problematic,” but rather, to inject the film with a sense of present-ness, capturing a snapshot of “the now” in order to ground us in an ever-evolving artistic and academic climate. She’s ostensibly correct, if also dismissive herself. Lydia, a Mahler devotee, has complicated feelings on the matter, which only grow thornier in a subsequent scene (filmed in a riveting, invisible long take) as she admonishes a young, queer student of color for dismissing and reducing the largely straight-white-male classical canon to the broad strokes of identity.
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For instance, the staged interview - filmed and edited as if for television, but with enough lingering shots of Lydia bristling against certain questions - brings up, among other artists, 19th century composer Gustav Mahler, and his personal and professional control over his wife, Alma. The text feels, at first, impenetrable to anyone not already immersed in the world of contemporary classical music, but it opens up pressingly relevant conversations on artistic methodology, and the way artists are canonized. When their conversation finally begins, it plays out at length on a fancy Manhattan stage, not only for the sake of inserting Lydia into real-world music history - she was a protégé to the late Leonard Bernstein, and a mentor to Joker and Chernobyl composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, who scored this very film - but in order to open up a detailed dialogue on composing and musical interpretation.

TÁR begins with a New Yorker symposium hosted by real-life journalist Adam Gopnik, whose rundown of Lydia’s achievements prior to their interview - appearing in the form of introductory voiceover - affords Field enough time to construct a montage of her professional life behind the scenes, from the way she selects her fitted suits, to how she lays out old orchestral records on her apartment floor, as if she were drawing a roadmap to some secret musical treasure.
