The movie also mentions that her birthday is coming up, so the specter of age also lingers around her, the notion that you can constantly re-create yourself, as she has, up to the point where it all catches up to you. She remade herself somewhere along the way she’s probably hoping to restart her career with her video-game orchestra in the same fashion. We also have to acknowledge that Lydia Tár isn’t even the character’s real name! When she goes back home to the suburbs, we discover, thanks to her brother Tony, that her real first name is Linda, and if you look closely at her old diplomas, you can see her last name is actually Tarr. It’s a little too infatuated with Lydia’s perspective to do that. The fact that Tár itself uses a faceless nonwestern location for its ending, however, doesn’t give it a lot of grounding for some strong anti-colonial argument. The film reminds you that Lydia began her illustrious career by studying the music of an indigenous group in the Amazon, and one suspects she may be trying to use the orchestra at the end in a similar way: to boost a career that will curve back toward western music. Perhaps going off to conduct a new orchestra is part of that narrative and this is only a show of humility. Earlier in the film, she meets with a crisis-PR firm of some kind, and a younger male employee suggests she needs to create a new narrative around herself. Then you have to consider that this all may be part of Lydia’s larger comeback scheme. Is this an appropriate cosmic punishment? Is it too much? Too little? She’s working, which is the thing she loves to do most but also the thing that grants her the power she abuses. To her, this may be an embarrassing gig, but she’s still in charge of an orchestra and in a position of power relative to the people around her. It’s a bitterly funny moment and a hell of a kicker for her journey.īut if we see almost all of the film’s action from Lydia’s perspective (aside from a few text messages), the movie pushes you to question her view at all times. If you’re invested in the contrast between high- and lowbrow culture - the film certainly is, devoting much of its run time to the specifics of Lydia’s rarefied world, from her concrete-chic Berlin apartment to her suite in the Carlyle Hotel - you get a stark sense of how far her career has slid. (It also seems that Field watched footage of actual concert performances of the Monster Hunter soundtrack they seem like a pretty fun time, all things considered.) The film starts at the New Yorker festival and ends at a concert of video-game music. What a place for Lydia Tár to end up! Given how much she reveres the western canon and sneers at conventional “robots,” the term she uses for people who don’t get her genius, we can assume she would hate video games and sneer at their music in any other circumstance. We hear serious video-game-style narration, and as the orchestra plays, we see the crowd is full of people cosplaying as characters from the video-game series Monster Hunter. She prepares the orchestra and then screens descend behind her. Then we get to her big return to the podium. She studies a score, lectures her musicians, and even goes to a massage parlor where she chooses a masseuse from a selection of young women with the implication that she may again be taking sexual advantage of the less powerful. (The dialogue doesn’t specify where she is, though performers from the Siam Sinfonietta play in the film.) Lydia seems disdainful of her new surroundings, but she slowly settles back into her old routines. By then, the disgraced conductor played by Cate Blanchett has left her glamorous life in Berlin and New York behind after reports of her grooming students broke in the press, and she has taken up a new job conducting an orchestra in Southeast Asia. Tár is the funniest movie of the year, though you may not key into director Todd Field’s bleak sense of humor until you arrive at the grand, most obvious joke at the end. We are recirculating it now that the film is available to stream on Peacock. This piece was originally published after Tár’ s theatrical release in October.
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