Tar review: The magic of Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett in Tár.

Greg and Zanna watch a movie about composure.

SCORES

Power of story: 2.5

Power of Cate Blanchett: 5

SHE SAW

Why do “good” movies have to be so long? I really enjoyed Tár. I wasn’t bored but time didn’t evaporate either. I was aware of its length while watching it, which suggests to me, it could do with some cutting. Either that or #bringbackintermission

Of course it must’ve felt impossible to cut a single frame of Cate Blanchett’s virtuosic performance. Every time she has been nominated for best actress at the Academy Awards, she’s been playing the titular character - Elizabeth, Blue Jasmine, Carol and now Lydia Tár. When Blanchett is the subject of the film, the film is good. I bet if she was the lead in an objectively dreadful student film, she would get that student an A+ and the Camera d’Or for best first film at Cannes.

In Tár, she plays the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic who has a public fall from grace when she’s accused of sexual misconduct with younger female musicians. It’s a fictional story and while the film is steeped in the world of classical music and uses a real orchestra, the Dresdner Philharmonie, to play the musicians, it’s not really about classical music, it’s about power and the abuse of it.

Still, the music and soundscape in general are central to this film. It would be hard to walk away from Tár without a deepened appreciation for classical music and the unique talent that gifted conductors have for interpreting composition. As you would expect of Blanchett, she trained meticulously with a conductor and insisted on genuinely conducting the music, not performing a caricatured impression of a conductor. Throughout, the film leaves no space to doubt the authenticity of its depiction of the classical world, casting brilliant British cellist Sophie Kauer as the young Russian musician who becomes the newest object of Tár’s inappropriate advances.

The film depicts the kind of abuses of power that are often downplayed or swept under the rug because they don’t include physical violence. They nevertheless can have devastating, and in this case fatal, consequences. I’ve read some pushback about the film demonising a character who is a rare woman in power but I don’t think this film is generalising about women or lesbians either: it’s making a point about people in positions of power, especially the power that is given to someone who has a rare gift or is considered a genius in their field. By removing the obvious threat of physical overpowering that is always present in a male-female power dynamic, the more subtle and insidious abuses of power become more salient and that’s interesting, nuanced and thought-provoking.

HE SAW

I found myself thinking about the length of the movie from its opening, in part because it opens with the end credits, which last several minutes and are themselves delivered in reverse, over a black screen, with a soundtrack representing the ethnographic fieldwork of the movie’s protagonist, about which we will find out much, much more in the incredibly drawn-out opening expositional interview that immediately follows the credits.

This weird, confusing, long-winded opening gambit is effectively a direct challenge to the audience: a way of saying, “If you have come here for excitement, you have come to the wrong place, and you’ve still got more than 2.5 hours of it to go.”

In a fractured attention economy, in which movies are battling for audience share with Netflix, TikTok, Instagram and people spending their workdays writing entertaining prompts into ChatGPT, this opening seems an astonishing act of film-makerly arrogance.

But I interrogated myself many times throughout its prodigious length to see if the running time was dragging, and it never was. In fact, as the movie wound into its denouement, I felt disappointed it wasn’t going to last another half hour.

It was not immediately clear to me why I was so transfixed. So little had happened in the movie, at least on an event-per-minute basis. The central storyline could easily have been completed in 90 minutes.

The answer, of course, lies in Cate Blanchett as Tár. She was a vibrating ball of tension, initially appearing self-contained, perfectly smooth and refined but gradually showing signs of puckering and blistering, beginning with her viciously repressed rage at her stepdaughter’s bully, her bad behaviour growing and metastasising into more adult forms, and ending with her inevitable horrifying self-implosion.

This is to say that the tension that held me so tightly I didn’t want to leave the cinema in spite of my sore butt was nothing to do with the compulsiveness of the narrative. It was a human connection and it was made almost entirely of actorly energy. We live in a world that increasingly fetishises story – three-act structure, inciting incidents, rising tension and so on – but what Tár reminds us is that the power of story is not technical; it’s emotional.

Tár is in cinemas now.