Review: Tár

Directed by Todd Field
Starring Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss

9/10

Tár is a stunning film in the ways you don’t expect it to be. There’s a powerhouse of a performance from Cate Blanchett to reign it all in, but she’s the anchor of a sometimes baffling and oftentimes intriguing character study of a fictional modern day classical composer.

The film does a great job at building up such a character of such high status. The first scene, where she’s simply being interviewed, shows how immense and almost untouchable her status is in the classical music world. It covers who she is in a superficial way, but it’s from here that we get to discover her truer self, a darker underbelly that suggests manipulation and control. And yet there’s still total clarity lacking, with the full picture not coming together, with the film switching between being a privileged voyeur to her world and then to seeing her life in a fragmented scramble.

In certain scenes, Tár really touches deeply and provocatively on delicate issues of our time including identity politics and cancel culture, which has resulted in a fury of debate or support from all sorts of viewers and critics. But watching Tár, it’s clearly even more than this – it’s using such hot button topics to expound on this character study that’s simultaneously inviting into the intimate life of Tár, yet also obscure with how much of her life’s circumstances or thought processes it actually shows.

Tár is the kind of exemplary film that’s so purely confident about itself, yet resists so hard to any kind of conformity to what a film like this should be. Some movies feel so cobbled together and many scenes and moments just feel out of place or don’t add up, which is a problem. The same could be said about this film, but it’s suitable because it perfectly matches the temperament of our titular character – she turns out to be so unreliable, but this is her film, so the film is also unreliable.

Honestly, Tár can be maddening, and even at times like these, it’s still enjoyable and never disengaging. It’s a film that’s so spiky and provocative, but it easily demands your attention, just from the anticipation of wanting to see where such a film leads us next. Although a fairly dark film, sometimes encroaching on an atmospheric horror, Tár is full of delights, certainly full of talking points, and reveals the right amount to be a conversation starter.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN