Tár (2022)

Tár kind of blew me away. This movie jumps right into the story it's telling with almost zero exposition. And its characters are throwing around terms related to conducting and Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar and the Berliner Philharmoniker without bothering to explain any of it to us. We have to learn the power structures in this movie while we watch, and we have no one to help us understand them. This is entirely appropriate, to my mind, but it creates identification problems – who are we here to love and like and whose side are we on, after all? I know that many of my friends experienced a great deal of distance from this movie, despite how beautifully made it is and how intriguing the story.

What we wind up watching with Tár is a Harvey Weinstein story – although I don't even need to watch the upcoming She Said to know this is very different from that narrative. Still, it is that to a certain extent. It's also not. For me, Tár follows precisely the structure of an Athenian tragedy, and it carried with it all of the aspects that attend one of those ancient plays. In other words, we are waiting for violence throughout the narrative. We know we are leading up to violence – this is how an Athenian tragedy is structured: we move toward atrocity, and we all know it is coming. This creates an enormous amount of tension in Todd Field's movie, and I watched Tár mostly in terror at what was coming. (Enjoying every moment.) It's worth noting that this film, like a Greek tragedy, is deeply haunted, as if there are ghosts around every turn, others watching, mysterious forms coming to get the characters and make them pay for the things they know they've done. I loved that about Tár.

The other thing to say about this ancient Athenian structure is a question of character. No one learns things in Athenian tragedy. That isn't the point of them. They're not teaching tools: they're ideological propaganda for the Athenian city-state. But often a character in a tragedy will do something that he or she feels he can get away with. To do something as if no one will punish you, to dare others to punish you just to see them cower, the ancient Athenians called this hybris. Lydia Tár, this film's central character, acts as if she can simply get away with anything she chooses to do. It's terrifying because for the whole film it feels as if we know retribution's coming but she doesn't see it. 

I want to say one more thing about Tár and character and identification. I know folks who have objected to the way this movie treated its central figure, punishing her, destroying her. And it is a dubious move to translate a sexual exploitation narrative into a story about a lesbian instead of telling this story about a man. (It's always made me very mad that Arthur Miller's The Crucible transferred the hysteria of the House un-American Activities Commission to the little girls in his play. It was grown men, in fact, who were hysterical fascists. And he made a play about little girls being hysterical fascists. Let's place the blame where it belongs.) Anyway, this film punishes her and brings her low. This was a problem for a few of my friends. It wasn't a problem for me, and I realized the reason while I listened to them speak about the movie. We had watched it very differently. They weren't identifying with Tár's main character while they watched. The distance and difficulty of the film meant that they did not see themselves in the main character. While I watched Tár I identified with her completely. This film made me think about my own hybris, the decisions I make out of ego and the things I believe I can get away with doing because of privilege. This is why, I in fact, loved the film. It's a difficult piece, and she's a difficult character to love, but I identified with her very fiercely, and I didn't feel self-satisfied by her punishment at the film's end; I felt unsettled and accused. For me this is what makes the film so great.