"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power."
Whitney Reese: Do you ever find yourself overwhelmed by emotion?
Lydia Tár: Yes, yes, it does happen.
Lydia Tár: Yes, yes, it does happen.
Tár is an American-German psychological drama film written and directed by Todd Field, his first movie since 2006's Little Children. The movie stars Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, a world-renowned composer and conductor, who becomes embroiled in a scandal surrounding allegations of inappropriate conduct.
The cast includes Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, and Mark Strong. The movie features original music by Hildur Guðnadóttir, who is mentioned in the film as having been mentored by Tár.
Not to be confused with any works with Tar; such as The Amazing Race (commonly referred to by the acronym "TAR"), or a viscous organic black liquid.
If you want to dance the masque, you must service these tropes:
- All for Nothing: Lydia alters her score so Olga has a chance to join the orchestra, then manipulates events to force her acceptance despite alienating other members in the process, as well as offering her private lessons in the hopes of seducing her. This contributes to the loss of her job and marriage, yet she is expertly rebuffed by Olga in the process.
- Ambiguous Situation:
- Throughout the film, snarky text exchanges sent by someone about Lydia are shown, but it's never clarified who's sending them. It's implied that they come from Francesca, but it could very well be from Olga, someone else, or multiple people.
- Are Francesca and Tár sleeping together?
- Are the noises that Lydia repeatedly hears in her apartment, as well as the screaming she hears while running in the park, real or not?
- Did Lydia sleep with the young woman she met in New York? She returns home with a similar handbag.
- Did Olga know that Lydia was attracted to her, and use it to her advantage?
- Armor-Piercing Response: Sharon fires one at Lydia, when Lydia asks if Sharon honestly believes their relationship is just transactional. Tellingly, Lydia has no comeback.Lydia: How cruel of you to define our relationship as "transactional".Sharon: There's only one relationship you've ever had that wasn't. And she's sleeping in the room next door. note Apparently, this hasn't even crossed your mind.
- As Himself: Journalist Adam Gopnik appears as himself at the start of the movie, giving a fawning interview to Lydia at a cultural event in New York. Alec Baldwin also makes a brief cameo as himself.
- As You Know: The film opens with Adam Gopnik giving an extensive introduction to Tár's life and career to open up an interview at a cultural festival. The details of her biography quickly make clear that almost anyone attending such an event would already be familiar with some of Tár's work, but it is still standard practice at these kinds of events and also serves to butter her up.
- Bilingual Bonus: While addressing the orchestra during rehearsals, Lydia repeatedly switches between English and German, most of which is unsubtitled.
- Bittersweet Ending: Lydia is removed from her position at the Berlin Philharmonic after several scandals, her marriage is over, and she's reduced to conducting for a Monster Hunter cosplay orchestra at a video game convention. On the one hand, her comeuppance is deserved; on the other, it stings to see a giant of classical music brought so low. Depending on how you view Lydia as a character, the possibility of a comeback can make this either more bitter or more sweet.
- Celebrity Paradox: Tár is mentioned to have commissioned musical pieces from Hildur Guðnadóttir, who composed the film's soundtrack.
- Double-Meaning Title: Tár is the protagonist's surname, but spelling the name without the accented letter creates the word "tar", alluding to how Lydia's reputation is tarred during the scandal.
- Dutch Angle: The Apartment for Sale
scene is shot with one, reflecting how Lydia's life is falling apart and she's becoming mentally unbalanced. - Foreshadowing:
- One of Lydia's lectures has her tell her students that at certain points in their career, they will have to take work for hire without much artistic merit and she simply hopes they "will be spared the embarrassment of selling a car without an engine". Lydia later ends up reduced to working as a conductor at a video game convention in the Philippines after her career is destroyed.
- Within this same lecture, Lydia has a mini-rant where she, in essence, tells Max to separate the art from the artist, because an artist's misdeeds don't have much to do with their music. Ironically, Lydia's prolific career ends because of her own misdeeds, which it seems she will be forever associated with despite her undeniable talent (should she try to rise above her current station).
- The opening interview has Adam Gopnik comment that most people see conductors as little more than human metronomes. Lydia's aforementioned Philippines job has her following a click track, literally reducing her to a human metronome.
- In an early scene, Davis notes that genius is often associated with an intolerance to noise. Tar spends the rest of the film being annoyed or even disturbed by unpleasant noises, some of them potentially imagined.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- The mysterious ghostlike presence of a blonde woman appears in the background of a few shots in Lydia’s apartment, her presence completely inexplicable, unexplained, and unaddressed. Doubles as Mind Screw and
Nightmare Fuel, especially when taken in consideration with the moved objects and the screams from The Blair Witch Project that Lydia hears on her run. - Pausing on Lydia's Wikipedia page reveals a few things about her, like where she got her EGOT status from: she won an Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Documentary Series or Special in 2010, a Grammy for Best Classical Album in 2011, an Oscar for Best Original Score in 2006, and a Tony for Best Original Score in 2008.In real life It also reveals other things, like that her father was a Hungarian immigrant named Zoltán Tarr who died when she was in college and that she left Harvard early to begin her postgraduate studies because of it.
- The mysterious ghostlike presence of a blonde woman appears in the background of a few shots in Lydia’s apartment, her presence completely inexplicable, unexplained, and unaddressed. Doubles as Mind Screw and
- From Bad to Worse: Krista is spoken of as a crazed ex-student who got dropped for behaviors like e-stalking Lydia. But her suicide and the aftermath obliterate Lydia's life, to the point she has to go to another continent to find someone in composer circles who hasn't heard of her.
- Hell Is That Noise: Lydia is repeatedly disturbed throughout the night by strange and faint noises coming from somewhere. The audience is only given answers as to what one of them is (a metronome), but the others are left up to interpretation as to if they're real or hallucinations caused by Lydia's rapidly deteriorating sense of mind.
- Ironic Hell: Lydia Tár, an egotistical champion of "highbrow" classical music, ends up conducting the score for Monster Hunter at a fan convention, even losing the ability to control her music's tempo.
- Irony: At the end of the movie, Lydia, an inveterate Control Freak and a genius of classical music, is forced to conduct a video game orchestra while following along with a click track - meaning that, for once, she has to follow someone else's orders.
- Lampshade Hanging: Near the end of the film, Lydia's brother remarks on all the loose threads in her story without elaborating, which gives Lydia some pause. The comment works in two respects, both criticizing her flimsy justifications for her behavior and calling attention to how much of the film will be Left Hanging.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Tár's inappropriate conduct ultimately costs her both her marriage and her job, thanks in part to her unappreciated assistant biting back. Her pride getting the better of her in a public setting is just the final nail in the coffin. A comeback isn't entirely out of the question, but it's clear she has a long, long uphill climb ahead of her.
- Left Hanging: There are many unexplained loose ends in this generally ambiguous film.
- Did Lydia warn other conductors of Krista because she was truly unstable, which was why their affair ended, or did Krista only become unstable after their affair ended and Lydia sabotaged her career?
- As Lydia examines her vinyls, another bare foot comes into frame, which Lydia tenderly strokes with her own. It isn't Sharon's, but it's unclear who exactly else it might belong to.
- The identity of who is making the live videos about Lydia is never revealed, and it may have even been multiple people.
- Lydia is repeatedly awoken by someone messing with her apartment, such as turning on her metronome. Whether it really is Petra playing, Lydia sleepwalking, or Francesca breaking in to harass her is unclear.
- Whether there's any truth to Lydia's accusation that Eliot is using her missing performance score of the 5th.
- Manipulative Editing: One of Lydia's classes is filmed and recut into a viral video. While the actual scene did involve her putting down a student and making some inappropriate political statements, the edit takes several moments out of context and splices her words together to make her behavior look more obscene and outrageous than it actually was. Lydia even says that the video has very obviously been edited, but her crisis management team notes that the damage has already been done.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Lydia remains completely unapologetic for her actions throughout the film but does seem to come to terms with the harm of her actions after her experience at a Filipino brothel.
- Naked First Impression: An extremely dark variation. The first time Lydia meets her elderly neighbor in her Berlin flat, it is after she has fallen down while being transferred to the toilet and her daughter frantically comes begging for Lydia's assistance with her naked and soiled mother. Lydia runs out in embarrassment afterwards and does not attempt to reconnect with them before the old woman dies shortly thereafter.
- Next Sunday A.D.: Despite being released in October 2022 and premiering at Venice a month earlier, the film takes place around November 2022 from the date of an article about Krista's suicide.
- The Oner: Many scenes are shot with extremely long takes, often while Tar is giving some sort of speech.
- Open Secret: According to Sebastian, everyone at the Berlin Philharmonic knows Tár hires and promotes women she's sleeping with, and it's heavily implied people also know these relationships are abusive in nature. Until it becomes public knowledge, with multiple women coming out to say Tár groomed them and the public turning on her, her employers simply ignore the allegations.
- Our Love Is Different: Lydia insists that, as much as she uses and exploits others to get ahead, she never viewed Sharon that way. Sharon rather understandably doesn't believe her. We never know for certain whether Lydia's telling the truth or if she did start out using Sharon but eventually fell in love for real.
- Passed-Over Promotion:
- Lydia denying Francesca the promotion she had worked so hard for ends up being the last straw for her assistant, with Francesca pulling a The Dog Bites Back.
- When Lydia decides to play Elgar's cello concerto along Mahler's 5th Symphony to give Olga a solo, she asks the first chair cello player if they can hold auditions instead of giving it to the first chair as would be done normally, clearly intending for Olga to get it. The first chair player is clearly aware of the ruse but accepts, dismayed that she's been passed over for a new member of the orchestra but knowing that there's nothing she can do about it.
- Precision F-Strike: Max calls Lydia a "fucking bitch" while storming out of her guest lecture.
- Romantic Fake–Real Turn: A bitter Sharon wonders if Lydia had initially just been using her to find success in Berlin before they officially got together, though Lydia adamantly denies their relationship ever was transactional.
- Shout-Out:
- Lydia references “Schroeder playing for Lucy” when she plays the piano during her Julliard class.
- Lydia claims to her angry wife that she brought Olga to New York to carry her luggage for her. This is the exact excuse used by a minister who went on vacation in Europe with a sex worker.
- Shown Their Work: Field's long absence from writing or directing left a lot of room for research into the world of orchestral music. The film is littered with accurate details about the field, from the process of setting up live recordings to the names of contemporary composers and conductors, to the extent that many viewers walked away thinking that the film was a Biopic of a real person.
- Tragedy: The film is an example of a modern classical tragedy, albeit a non-fatal one: a person of great power and prosperity is undone by her fatal flaws, building to a cathartic reckoning.
- Unreliable Expositor:
According to Field, parts of Tár's official biography are patently false, notably her claim to have been mentored by Leonard Bernstein; her actual exposure to Bernstein was limited to the tapes we see her watch. The historical Bernstein died in 1990, when Tár would still have been a teenager.note - Leonard Bernstein did animate masterclasses with young musicians even as late as 1987, so it's not impossible that Tár would have met him and then exaggerated the extance of his mentorship.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: At the end of the film, Lydia is subject to one in a Philippine street after her experience in a brothel, seemingly because it forced her to come to terms with what she did to Krista and tried to do to Olga.
"Didn't you feel triumphant?"
