YMMV / Tár

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Most obvious is Lydia herself. Is she an irreplaceable visionary whose personal flaws brought about her downfall? Is she an irredeemable tyrant who was propped up and coddled for too long? Was she always abusive, or was she corrupted by power? How justified is her diatribe against Max about the incompatibility of art and identity? Does she deserve to make a comeback? Has she actually learned anything or changed at all, or is her Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job a calculated ploy to show how "humbled" and "remorseful" she is to better her public image?
  • There's also the question of Sharon, Lydia's wife. Is she a long-suffering woman in an unhappy marriage who grudgingly tolerates her wife's infidelity? Or is she as complicit in Lydia's abuses of power as Lydia herself who only rejects her when Lydia's actions threaten her own livelihood?
  • Then there's Francesca, Lydia's assistant. Is her betrayal of her boss a case of The Dog Bites Back after being taken for granted for so long or a cynical act of ambitious opportunism? Is she another one of Tár's lovers and/or victims? Did Tár plan on promoting her until her mounting Casting Couch controversies made the optics untenable, making Francesca's betrayal even more dramatically ironic, or was she truly just stringing her along the whole time?
  • Why does Olga have Tár drop her off at an abandoned apartment complex? Is she secretly homeless and trying to hide it, or does she know of Tár's intentions with her and is taking precautions by not telling her where she really lives?
  • What exactly was the deal with Krista and Tár? Did Krista refuse Tár's advances and report her to her superiors, leading Tár to ruin her career out of revenge? Did they have a relationship that ended badly, and Tár's later actions were motivated by spite against an ex? If the latter, was the relationship Questionable Consent or straight-up Sexual Extortion?
  • What was Francesca's relationship to Krista? Were the two good friends, possibly bonding their shared experiences and toxic relationships with Tár? Were they only acquaintances, not especially close, but nonetheless had a sort of bond because very few other people could really "get" what they dealt with? Were they coworkers and/or classmates in the past? Were they perhaps a couple at one point? (If so, how Tár did or didn't fit into that arrangement is a whole other question.) Francesca is clearly heartbroken by Krista's suicide, and is put off by Tár telling her to forget about Krista, so clearly there was some sort of prior connection between the two, but the film never tells us what it was.
• Award Snub: Failed to win any of its six nominations at the 95th Academy Awards despite being one of the best reviewed films of the year. In particular, while many agreed that Michelle Yeoh (for Everything Everywhere All at Once; which beat it for five of its nominations) was a worthy winner for Best Actress, there were also some who felt that Cate Blanchett gave a better performance and should have won instead.
• Ending Fatigue: The movie seems like it's going to end after Lydia's Villainous Breakdown after learning she's been replaced at the climactic concert, but then we get another cathartic scene of Lydia crying in her childhood home, and then we see multiple scenes of her arrival in the Philippines, and then we finally cut to the actual final concert, and then it ends nearly a half hour after the climax.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Maestro, naturally, due to it being a biopic of Lydia's beloved mentor Leonard Bernstein. A very common headcanon is that, within the universe of Tár, Lydia served as a creative consultant on Maestro and was the one who taught Bradley Cooper how to conduct.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Fans absolutely love making Tár puns, with "what in tárnation" and "Avatár" being some of the most popular ones, the latter especially due to the release of Avatar: The Way of Water two months after Tár.
  • "Apartment for Sale", the deliberately bad song that Lydia plays in order to annoy people looking to buy the apartment across from hers, has caught on with fans, with some people jokingly wanting the studio to campaign it for Best Original Song. (for what it's worth, Focus did upload it to YouTube with the description reading "see the true best original song")
• Nightmare Fuel: The two brief glimpses of Krista's "ghost" hiding in the background haunting Lydia. Her strange auditory hallucinations (which are sometimes clearly audible, but at other points are so subtly incorporated in the sound mix that the viewer might be unsure if it's ambient noise in the cinema or sound coming from the film) and the scene where she wanders through an abandoned building and hears a person behind her could all come from a horror movie (especially as some of the sound effects used came from The Blair Witch Project).
• Play-Along Meme: Due to many viewers assuming that Lydia Tár was a real person instead of a fictional character, several people have gone along with it, such as lamenting about her downfall, sharing anecdotes about meeting her, and reporting news on what's happened to her. Even Vulture got in on it, posting an article claiming that the film was a biopic and sharing fun facts about Lydia as if she were an actual person. There's also a fan-run Lydia Tár Twitter account that tweets things completely in-character and also has a website and a Letterboxd account for her, also completely in-character. The pinnacle of this was when Todd Field's claims that Lydia was lying about having been mentored by Leonard Bernstein since she was just a teenager when he died were refuted by the actual estate of Leonard Bernstein in The New Yorker, claiming that Leonard recognized her as a prodigy and mentored her during his last year of life.
  • After the film failed to win any awards at 2023 Oscars, many Twitter users began joking that this was yet further proof that Lydia was a victim of cancel culture.
• Spiritual Successor: The movie can be viewed as a counterpart to Whiplash—both are character studies about obsession, egotism and abusive teacher-student dynamics in the field of music, with Tár focusing on the mentor figure, whereas Whiplash is centered on the student.
• Tearjerker:
  • Krista’s emails to Lydia where she desperately begged her to change her mind about not recommending her for other musical programs, with the last one resigning herself to the end of her career before she commits suicide.
  • While most of Lydia's downfall is pure Laser-Guided Karma, it's still genuinely sad to see Sharon taking Petra away, refusing to let Lydia speak with her, and Lydia tearfully begging her, "Please don't do this!" Given that Petra is the only person Lydia loves more than herself, and Petra is shown to adore her, it's heartbreaking to see them torn apart.

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