Rating: 9/10 | Director: Todd Field | Runtime: 158 min | Released: October 2022

Todd Field made one film in 2001, one in 2006, and then disappeared for sixteen years. Tár is what he came back with, and it is worth every minute of the wait. It is a film about a woman at the height of her professional power who is methodically dismantled, built with the patience and precision of the classical music it centers on.

Who Lydia Tár Is

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the most prestigious positions in classical music. She is also brilliant, calculating, and capable of genuine cruelty when her authority is questioned. The film opens with an extended interview sequence that establishes her complete command of every room she enters. She is funny, perceptive, and exactly the kind of person who has learned to perform generosity so convincingly that it takes time to see what lies beneath it.

The film then spends its considerable runtime watching that performance crack. Allegations from former students begin to surface. A protégé she sponsored distances herself. Her personal assistant grows colder. The details accumulate slowly, without the drama of a single confrontation, and the effect is more unsettling than any courtroom scene would have been.

Blanchett

It is not an exaggeration to say this is one of the great screen performances of the past twenty years. Blanchett does not ask for your sympathy, and she does not ask you to hate Tár either. She plays someone who has genuinely earned her position and who has genuinely abused it, without softening either side. The scene early in the film where she demolishes a young student in a masterclass is almost unwatchable in its casual cruelty, and yet you understand Tár’s reasoning even as you flinch from it. That is very hard to pull off.

What Blanchett does that is technically extraordinary is never let you see the seams. Tár moves through the world as someone who has never doubted her right to occupy it, and that certainty only begins to flicker in the film’s final third. When it does, the change is internal before it is visible, and Blanchett communicates it through the smallest adjustments in how Tár holds her body.

What the Film Is Doing

Field is not making a simple story about a powerful person brought down by accountability. The film is interested in harder questions: what happens to the work when the person behind it is compromised, and what does it mean that we separate the two when it is convenient and refuse to when it is not? A scene where Tár argues that Bach’s music should be evaluated on its own terms, not dismissed because of who Bach was, is deliberately placed before we know the full extent of her own conduct. The film does not give you a clean answer. It trusts you to sit with the discomfort.

The ending is strange and deliberate, and it has divided audiences. It is the right ending. A film this precise about how power works and how institutions process its abuse earns a conclusion that does not offer resolution.

Tár is not an easy watch. It is slow, cold at times, and unwilling to make any of its central questions comfortable. It is also, frame for frame, one of the best films of this decade.