“TÁR”: Against Auteurism

Todd Field’s latest masterpiece dissects the infection of hierarchy and control in art

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. 

TÁR sets itself apart from the rest the moment the opening credits appear on the screen. Before we see a single second of content, we see the names of every single member of the crew, names usually reserved for the last minutes of the ending credits when most have already filtered out of the theater. By doing this, director Todd Field turns auteurist theory on its head, going out of his way to preemptively showcase the collective creative force behind TÁR, a force often sidelined for the sake of the powerful names associated with the production. TÁR is about just that: a powerful auteur blinded by individual power, leading her to fly too close to the sun. For the next 150 minutes, we watch a story about a manipulative, egotistical woman’s fall from grace, told entirely from her perspective as the previously unfamiliar concept of consequence slowly intercepts her hubris. A woman who likes to play God feels what it is like to be seen as the Devil.

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a profoundly intriguing but not unfamiliar protagonist. As a highly acclaimed conductor, our first interaction with her is, quite literally, a laundry list of her accolades leading up to the start of the film. TÁR spends the next hour or so establishing a totally divine understanding of her character. She is an unstoppable and immovable creative force who had to overcome countless barriers due to her gender and sexuality in an elite field. She cares deeply for her family and her partner, but most of all, she has an incomparable dedication to classical music. During the first act, we get a comprehensible understanding of how she views herself: a deity of modern orchestra.

Yet this image does not last long. Though TÁR never falters from the perspective of its protagonist, we slowly begin to see just how irresponsible Lydia is with her control. It first comes into view when she arrogantly tells off a student of color at Juilliard for not worshiping the works of figures like Bach, and it escalates when she violently threatens her daughter’s elementary school bully. Public outcry slowly begins to manifest after several allegations of sexual misconduct with young women, culminating with the shocking suicide of another up-and-coming conductor and Lydia’s alleged involvement with the case. 

Even though the story is told from an empathetic perspective, it is entirely antithetical to the film’s nature to say that TÁR is sympathetic toward its protagonist. TÁR is the ultimate study of an unreliable narrator. Lydia is just as manipulative toward the audience as she is toward those around her. What we initially peg as an objective perspective evolves into a slow revelation of the reach of Lydia’s manipulation. TÁR is not a dialogue about “The Art vs. The Artist” but an intervention in our understanding of art and power. TÁR uproots the cliché paradigm of separating the art from the artist because that conversation is blind to the reality that much of art is preoccupied with control. The power of art is corrupted by the art of power. 

Lydia’s control over the audience only falters on a few occasions for a brief few seconds, but they are some of the most crucial seconds in the film because they are the only times we come face to face with her guilt. Lydia lives through sound, and the only times we see her genuinely emotionally shaken is when she is haunted by a sound she cannot locate or control. These sounds are a physical manifestation of her guilt - a car door that won’t stop rattling, distant screams that she cannot locate, and the clicking of heels from a person she cannot identify. It is in these select instances that Lydia’s mask slips. Her grasp on us loosens, and instead, the force of guilt constricts around her. 

TÁR never verbally denounces Lydia, nor does it condemn the forces demanding her accountability. There seems to be a lot of expectation and misinterpretation that TÁR is THE high-brow, slow-burn dissection of identity politics and cancel culture that serves a concrete, indisputable conclusion on a silver platter. But that would be an impossible task. TÁR doesn’t want us to study whether or not punishment is merited; it wants us to think about hierarchy’s parasitic infection of art and the abuse that manifests in absurd elitism. 

The film refrains from black-and-white moral judgment because it respects and trusts the audience to reach the intended conclusion without hand-holding. The multifaceted take-down of abuse of power through the eyes of a serial perpetrator makes TÁR one of the most complex and beautifully crafted character studies of the 21st century.

OVERALL SCORE: 10/10

TÁR was released on October 14 and is currently showing in US theaters.