Some questions about "Tàr" (long, spoilers)
What really happens in the film, "Tàr"?
a. Nothing, silly. It's a movie.
b. Ha ha. Actually, within the confines of the reality within the movie, this is a pretty straightforward story of a world-famous conductor who abuses her power to take advantage of female musicians. In the course of the story, her long history of abusive behavior is revealed to the public and her life unravels, leaving her alone and having to start over her career from the bottom, hopefully having learned her lesson.
c. Same, only everything after she descends into the weird underground apartment complex and is menaced by a shadowy dog who chases her until she faceplants hard onto cement is not real, it's either a dream or a metaphor, because she's in a coma or dead. Other odd scenes before that are dream sequences following which we see Lydia wake up in bed, establishing that some of what we see are actually Lydia's dreams. The story, however, is straightforwardly following the path described above.
d. What we see in the movie is entirely real and following the course of B, but portrayed from a pov so deeply embedded in the protagonist's mind that critical details are distorted or omitted; moreover, the protagonist is experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations as a result of her guilt over the death of Krista.
e. The entire film is literally happening as described in B, however there are supernatural elements at work that make Tàr more of a horror genre piece than people are prepared to accept from a prestige film. Lydia is being haunted by the spirit of Krista, and it is this spirit that is making strange things happen around her. We have several direct sightings of this ghost, a red-headed woman seen in the audience at several points and in Lydia's home at night. Possibly Krista is the architect of Lydia's downfall.
f. This is possibly the least straightforward film I've seen in a decade or more; potentially none of what we see directly is literal.
2. What evidence from the film supports this explanation?
a. LOL.
b. We are not given any reasons to doubt that Lydia has been abusing her power, or that the women she has been abusing are lying. It seems to be an open secret that Lydia preys on beautiful young musicians, and even Lydia's wife knows very well about these affairs. It is, in fact, exactly how she ended up with Lydia in the first place, and how she continues to be the Concertmaster in her orchestras across the world. The other women, it is implied, are discarded when they are no longer interesting to or of use to Lydia, and this keeps her wife more or less satisfied and in place. When the press begins to put the pieces together after several leaks of information, leaks from people we have witnessed Lydia mistreating onscreen, Lydia's financial backers, her collaborators, and her orchestra can no longer ignore what she has been doing, and neither can her wife. Although it happens very quickly, it is reasonable that her downfall would follow under these conditions, especially given the suicide of one of her former conquests. The film depicts all of these events directly in a cinema verite-like style, unadorned, without even a soundtrack unless it is being played by a character onscreen, to emphasize the reality of events. The story is the story, it all literally happens.
c. However. The passage in the abandoned building differs stylistically from the rest of the movie and is filmed in the manner of a thriller, and everything depicted after that is heightened and sped up considerably from the more leisurely pace of the first hour. The bulk of Lydia's downfall occurs after this scene, and we start to feel at this point as though scenes are missing. Events are elided and described later offhandedly, where before they had been portrayed almost in real time. The hammer falls blow after blow to Lydia's life and career from this point onwards. Is this actually Lydia's fears we are seeing? Is it some kind of coma dream or afterlife, where she is being punished for her sins?
That abandoned building scene is also, let's all agree, weird as fuck. I mean what is that dog? It's a weird fucking dog? And is it actually chasing Lydia? She certainly thinks it is and she's running away from it like crazy, but after that first glimpse we don't actually see it chasing her. We certainly don't see it catch her after she falls, which it obviously would if it was actually biting at her heels. Lydia isn't bitten anywhere afterwards. Her injuries are from the fall on the concrete, which banged up her face and damaged her shoulder. The only explanation is that she imagined the dog and ran from her own panic, if this event occurred at all. Or is it her own guilt? She then frames the incident, consistently, as an attack on her by a man, one that coincides with an avalanche of accusations and abandonments that come one by one after this scene. Her face heals quite quickly, but her shoulder continues to bother her and a doctor diagnoses her with “Notalgia paraesthetica", or a phantom itch that cannot be relieved. Is this trauma? Is the new vagueness of the timeline and her muffled reaction to events a result of trauma? Is it Lydia's guilt and paranoia that is coming up with this thorough dismantling of her own life and persona in some kind of fevre dream? This leads us to answer D:
d. Close point of view. Lydia is in every scene. Everything is as she perceives it to be. If something is strange, it is because her perceptions are unreliable.
Let's talk about Lydia. Who the fuck is Lydia Tàr? Lydia Tàr is convincingly brilliant. Her speeches are pretentious but also knowledgable, coherent: she's not actually an idiot like Miles Bron. She is genuinely passionate about her work, constantly engrossed in music, comparing everything she encounters to a song or a composer or a conductor of the past.*
We are put inside her head, perceiving things the way she does. We hear the odd snatches of music and sound that distract her, things no one else hears, and see her incorporate these bits and pieces into her music. We see dream images, faces, that send her bolting upright in bed. We see strange events that only she knows about but are definitely real, such as her sick neighbor who has to be helped back to bed in an emergency, naked, wasting away and incoherent. We later see that apartment come up for sale, and when the sellers come by and gently suggest she keep the noise down so she can sell the apartment, she has a fairly childish reaction. (But honestly this was the one bit where I actually liked Lydia in her terribleness; anyone who has had annoying neighbors will laugh big at her sudden loud accordion playing and atonal rendition of "APARTMENT FOR SALE!!!!") These anecdotes don't add to the story whatsoever, and are there to plant us further in the protagonist's mindset, fit us in her shoes a little bit more.
Lydia Tàr is abominably self-absorbed. The first indication of this that we directly witness is how she is stealing Sharon's medicine and popping pills while on the road, so much so that when she gets home, Sharon is in the middle of an attack (heart condition or panic? unclear) and has no pills left to take. Much later in the film, when everything has fallen apart, Sharon is the most upset by the fact that Lydia didn't warn her about the legal case or the depositions or the newspaper stories, she was left in the dark to be blindsided by them. Lydia's response? Sharon couldn't have done anything to help. So why tell her? This seems a completely reasonable response to Lydia. Causing Sharon distress does not seem to register to her at all.
A lot of things don't register to Lydia at all. Small time-skips are so common in film that you tend not to notice them, but they are particularly noticable here. Scene to scene it is suddenly days later, weeks later, and dialogue makes certain that we know this. Lydia mentions events that are extremely relevant to the story, but we didn't know have already happened offscreen. Yet we see her visit to the doctor, her session with the beautiful cellist, instead. We see what is important to her, and don't see what is not. This, I would argue, is what lends the film a sense of surreality when the style of filmmaking is otherwise so realistic.
The audience is unsurprised when her assistant Francesca abandons her, this was inevitable from the very first scene of the film. She is an old lover, a previous round of the cycle who found a niche in Lydia's life to occupy, and is being strung along with the promise of an assistant position that is obviously never going to be offered. To her face, she dangles the possibility of that position coming to her immediately, in order to get her to do what she needs her to do: delete all evidence of her relationship with Krista. Afterwards, she gives the position to someone else instead, and even tasks her with some of the arrangements. It would be more shocking if she didn't abandon Lydia at that point, after such a blatant slap in the face. Still, the film treats this as a revelation, because Lydia for whatever reason does not see this coming even though she really, really should have.
In fact, a lot of Lydia's actions are so thuddingly obviously going to blow up in her face that you have to wonder if she is more self-destructing than being taken down from outside. Her continued pursuit of the cellist when the whole organization seems to be aware of it and she's already in trouble for Krista, for instance.
So we come to the strange little scenes where Lydia is hearing a sound, and can't find where it is coming from. These range from innocuous (a high-pitched tone in her apartment) to threatening (a woman's terrified screams in the park where she is jogging). In all cases she searches for the sound. In only one case does she uncover it, but that only makes it more inexplicable -- the metronome has started ticking, despite being put away and with no one in the room to turn it on. She questions her daughter about playing in her study, but the daughter does not seem to know anything about it.
We get glimpses of a red-haired woman -- first right at the beginning of the film, and later in Lydia's home. When her daughter wakes up and calls out her name, Lydia goes to her room sleepily and on the way she passes a figure in the darkness who appears to be the same red-headed woman. The woman is not literally there, but she is on Lydia's mind. We learn at a certain point that this is at least a reference to Krista, the woman who committed suicide after Lydia sabotaged her career.
Why is the only thing the audience sees that Lydia couldn't possibly see is Francesca's text messages? This is a break in the POV that doesn't work if we're watching in real-time, but if this is Lydia looking backwards somehow, she could easily intuit what Francesca was thinking at the time. If Lydia is capable of imagining anyone else's interior life. (Does Lydia have a conscience? Essay question.)
e. The supernatural interpretation is self-explanatory given the glimpses of the red-headed woman. Lydia's life really unravels after Krista's death, and perhaps there is a kind of haunting taking place that explains the weird noises and the metronome. But given that, let's mention how far-fetched some of the events of the last passage of this film are.
The viral video, edited together to make Lydia say things she didn't in a way that seems plausible at first. But how was this video filmed? None of the students in the class are shown using their phones during the encounter in question. The multiple perspectives imply that there have to be 5 or 6 people recording, but we see none of them. Lydia forbids use of cell phones in her class. How was this video made?
Lydia tackling Mark Strong at the podium. How did Lydia get backstage? Why do none of the players react to her presence, as someone who has been fired from the orchestra and very much should not be there? Why doesn't the trumpet player who is standing right next to her not see her? Why doesn't anyone try to stop her until it's too late? And how did Mark Strong get ahold of her copy of the score, which went missing from Lydia's own house?
And so on and so on. Are these mistakes? By a film so meticulously grounded and realistic in the portrayal of the life of a classical musician? Is this the spirit of Krista interfering somehow to make absolutely sure Lydia loses absolutely everything? Or is something else happening?
edit: I'm going to add this very good essay from the perspective of a classical musician that reinforces the unreality of these choices. She feels that the film is bungling an attempt at realism; I want to discuss the possibility that the film isn't attempting realism at all.
f. We accept that cinema verite means realism. We accept this because we have been trained to over the course of decades. The hallmarks of a documentary style** including lack of soundtrack, long and static shots, conversations that meander, scenes that drag, conjure in our minds a sense that we are witnessing something directly. The one exception to this is the horror genre, where all of these same stylistic choices (plus a lot of hand-held camera) in a found-footage film are used to jolt the audience into accepting supernatural events, generating fear from the intrusion of unreality into reality. This is also one possible definition of the surreal.
How many more events in this film signify that none of this is happening at all? Let's take the scene at the end of the film where Lydia Tàr goes home, surprisingly, to Staten Island. There we see evidence of a family who were not present at all in Lydia's home or life to this point, yet who have followed her accomplishments closely. We see a man who is possibly her brother. He states that "Ma" talked to Lydia and warned him she would be coming home (we did not see this conversation). He calls Lydia "Linda". He suggests that her manner of speaking in the rest of the movie is an affectation, and her response to him drops a little bit of this affected speech, which appears to confirm this. All this adds a little more backstory that tells us of a hometown girl hitting it big and never looking back, right?
But there is one more lie revealed here. Lydia pulls out a videotape of Leonard Bernstein, an obviously much-loved and much-watched tape of one of his educational concerts. In it he says a number of things that Lydia has repeated throughout the movie, which she seems to have lifted from this videotape.
Now remember the long interview at the beginning of the film, where Lydia/Linda claimed to have been a protégé of Leonard Bernstein who studied under him directly. This isn't true! It's demonstrably not true, and director Todd Field confirms this in interviews which means it's an important detail. Leonard Bernstein died in 1990, and this movie takes place after the pandemic (it's mentioned several times), and this mentoring relationship is temporally unlikely. Yet nobody questioned it. It should be easy to confirm that it isn't true, with records and with common sense. Does this mean the entire classical music world was deceived into elevating this woman on one easily disproven lie? How much more of her resume is false? Her unlikely stories of ethnographic fieldwork, deliberately described in detail and interwoven with her intellectual posturings, could she have simply read all these details in a book? But why? And wouldn't a journalist have picked up on any and all of these lies years before, for the most famous conductor in the world?
How much more of what she says in that interview with Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker, the real Adam Gopnik from the real New Yorker, is a complete fabrication? How about when she talks to Alec Baldwin's real podcast? Or gets tailored clothes from the real designer Egon Brandstetter, who really designed the real suits that Lydia Tàr, I mean Cate Blanchett, wears in the movie? Do these details make the movie more real, or more unreal?
How about that name, Lydia Tàr? She chose a more exotic name than Linda, we are to believe. How bout that accent mark? The accent mark that does not affect the pronounciation and is apparently just there for decoration? That accent mark on Tàr makes no fucking sense and I have always thought this from the first time I saw a promo for the movie and imagine my delight that this is on purpose! And yet nobody else, including her wife, ever refer to her as Linda, even when the tabloids are tearing her life apart? Do you think the New York Post wouldn't revel in the headline that Lydia Tàr is actually Linda Tarr from Staten Island?
What I'm saying is that all of this is unreal. It's Goncharov all the way down, kids. Tàr hashtag unreality.
What does that mean about the film Tàr? If none of what we see is plausible, does that mean the film is inaccurate and a bad movie? If the film contradicts itself on purpose, why would it do that? Does it mean the film is a daydream by a girl on Staten Island, or by a dying woman in an apartment who has to be picked up off the floor and put back in her wheelchair? Should we think of it as Lynchian, a kind of cousin to Mullholland Drive, where any reality being portrayed is not shown onscreen directly, ever?
Is it not a coherent story at all, but something else?
3. What else can a film be, besides a story?
a. A diary
b. A dream
c. A metaphor
d. A confession
e. A suicide note
f. A last will and testament
4. What is surrealism?
a) a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.
b) marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream
c) when stuff looks crazy and weird
5. No really, what literally happens in the film Tàr?
a. A woman gets canceled.
b. The past and the present converge—the flip sides of the same cosmic coin.
c. teshuvah: “the Talmudic power to reach back in time and transform one’s past deeds.”
d. Nothing. It's a movie.
*There's a useful phrase-- conductor of the past. Her right hand controls time. Can it speed up time? Can it slow time down? Could it even reverse the flow of time?
**Documentaries, of course, are also not necessarily the truth. They are manipulated, edited, staged. Details are selected and omitted. And, of course, the people in them can lie.
