Venice film festival: A fictional biography set in the world of classical music follows Lydia Tár, the imperious but troubled Maestro, in an ultra-stylish drama with a shocking climax
could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for this engrossing movie from writer-director Todd Field, about a globally renowned conductor heading for a crisis or crackup or creative breakthrough. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.
She plays Lydia Tár, imagined to be principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, addressed by colleagues as “Maestro”. There are lots of scenes shot in the real concert hall, and Tár has an onstage interview with a real journalist: the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, playing himself – which could have been a gimmicky and self-conscious shortcut to authenticity, but isn’t.
There are problems in Tár’s life. She runs a mentoring scholarship programme for women, administered by a tiresome, oleaginous would-be conductor, played by, and there are rumours that this is a source of young women with whom Tár has affairs.
And all the time, Tár suspects that there is something wrong: she is twitchy, paranoid and insomniac. We know from the outset that she is effectively being spied upon. There are strange sounds, intrusions and things out of place. Tár threatens a little girl at her daughter’s school that she hears is a bully. And the music itself, so far from being an emollient, amplifies the violence just beneath the surface.
Tár has a job in which hubris pretty much comes with the territory: like a field marshal, you have a baton. There’s no point in being a conductor who is shy and retiring: the job requires you to stand in front of musicians, on a podium, directing them with extravagant gestures. And Tár has a natural way with all this, with all the politics, and the diplomacy and the media-management.
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