(Spoilers all the way through, including the end.)
Many of the people who saw this in the theatre with me groaned at the end, and several came up to me and asked me if I understood what “that was all about.” It’s kind of disappointing when people have become so used to being spoon fed the 3 act movie arc that when something goes in only one direction, they simply don’t get what they’ve seen.
If you read several reliable reviewers, you’ll pick up on the fact that what Tar (her name is Lydia Tar) believes is that there are some feelings which are impossible to name, and can only be expressed or “named” if you will, in music, and specifically classical music.
Another word for this is the sublime. But that’s not exactly what the movie is about. That is what she is about. What the movie is about is basically the tragedy of Tar. It opens with her teaching a master class in conducting at Julliard – a class with about 15 students.
Correction: It opens with a New Yorker style talk with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik playing himself. The importance of this scene is two-fold: to establish that she is one of the world’s greatest conductors, that she is at the top of her game, and secondly, and very very subtly, she states that she really doesn’t care that she has reached the pinnacle of what is essentially a male field. It’s important to know this because it tells us she is not interested in identity or gender politics.
We learn much later in the film that technology was not allowed in the masterclass, but someone is recording her. Tar, who is played by Cate Blanchett, if it even needs to be said, is at the absolute peak of her career and it shows in the way she teaches this class. When she asks one of the students if he had ever conducted a Bach piece, he answers no, because as a bisexual BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person Of Color), he could not support the patriarchy of Bach, who fathered 20 children. She goes on to try to help him see beyond the identity of Bach and listen to the meaning (and feelings) of his music and ultimately starts berating him for his views. He calls her a bitch and leaves the class, but she isn’t the slightest bit fazed or shocked and says, on his way out, that he needs to study music more and social media less. She has absolutely no qualms about what happened, even though it was a bit shocking and most of us who have wondered about identity politics and the stress on identity of the last two decades or so, know that she’s walking on thin ice.
She doesn’t seem to know this. But throughout the movie you have the deep sense that she’s either going to destroy herself or something external is going to destroy her. She’s gay, married to the concert master of the Berlin Philharmonic, where she is planning to conduct her final Mahler Symphony, #5, which is the most mysterious and difficult because Mahler left very little on how to interpret it. (You could also apply that statement to this movie.) But she’s also somewhat of a groomer and predator, and we start to learn this from her assistant, who has musical ambitions of her own. Her assistant brings to her attention that a former protege named Krista is feeling increasingly desperate because she can’t get work. She ultimately kills herself and then we find out that Tar basically sabotaged any attempt that this woman made to find a conducting job. Why she did this, we aren’t told, except that she was “strange.” When a pretty brilliant cellist joins the philharmonic, and before the orchestra has had a chance to vote on whether to accept her, Tar starts making the moves on her, and decides to play as a companion piece to the Mahler #5, the very famous Elgar Cello concerto that the incomparable Jacqueline Du Pre perfomed and popularized. Instead of giving the solo job to the first cellist, which would be normal, Tar has auditions instead and has the first cellist be one of the judges. Olga gets the job and we see Tar moving in, slowly.
Tragedies almost always have a moment when the character is given an opportunity to change course — this either comes as advice (in Chinatown, the Jack Nicholson character is told to stop looking for Faye Dunaway [because he doesn’t know the full story], but he doesn’t and ultimately gets her killed.) Or it comes in the form of a moment which the character doesn’t notice. It’s akin to Tippy Hedron climbing the stairs to the attic and opening the attic door in The Birds.
In this, I think that moment comes when her beleaguered personal assistant is passed over (by Tar) for the position of assistant conductor. Her assistant disappears the following day, and everything that happens since has a frantic and dangerous quality. She’s speeding through the street of Munich like a crazy person, until her wife makes her stop the car so she can get out. But that doesn’t stop her. A video of the master class where she humiliates a BIPOC gets re-edited, sliced, and chopped together in a way that makes it sound like she was using racial slurs. (I’m pretty sure that the person who took that video was her assistant, as the rule about no technology would not have applied to her.) Eventually she loses her position in the orchestra and in a final self destructive act, decides to rush on stage and beat up the conductor who has replaced her for the actual performance.
Thereafter, she loses her wife, her child, her job, her apartments, and she has to return to Queens where she’s from. Her lump of a brother is there, and we learn through him that her name is Linda, not Lydia. She meets with an agency that has a plan to rebuild her career, and her first stop is to conduct an orchestra in Indonesia. I couldn’t tell if the piece they were playing was music from a video game, but the entire audience is dressed in monster cos play gear, and the orchestra, we’re told in the credits that follow, is called The Monster Hunter Orchestra. It’s startling, but she is essentially unchanged. Only now, she’s at the bottom of her game.
The direction is very much in the style of Kubrick and perhaps her name is a reference to the filmmaker Tarkovsky who was noted for long takes and the slow pacing of his movies. But I think it’s closer to Kubrick (the director Todd Field played the piano player in Eyes Wide Shut,) in that Kubrick never really liked to dig too deeply into the psychology of his characters. He simply liked to present them to the audience without commenting on their behavior. Here, I think the confusion this movie generates — especially among U.S. audiences — is because we aren’t told what to think or how to feel.