Few things unite queer filmgoers quite like our love of Cate Blanchett. The Carol star’s captivating onscreen presence borders on bewitching, especially when she’s bringing complex lesbian characters to life. But her performance in Todd Field’s Tár may be her most mesmerizing to date — and one of her most complex.
The nearly three-hour modern masterpiece follows a fictional lesbian conductor named Lydia Tár — and again, we must remind you, she is not real — as she embarks on a career goal: completing her recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. Established early in the film as a formidable force in intellectual circles, Tár wields her influence in questionable and indeed potentially abusive ways, most notably with a former protégé, Krista Taylor, whose name lingers at the edges of the film until her allegations become its central focus.
Early in the film, Tár instructs another student, “You’ve got to sublimate yourself, your ego, and yes, your identity,” but by the end of the film, her own ego and unsublimated rage prove to be her undoing. Blanchett portrays that unraveling with expertise, every sigh and flinch telling a story.
But the film, which is already generating Oscar buzz, also offers plenty of fodder for discussion, aside from its talented lead. Tár dives into issues like “cancel culture,” the notion of separating art from artist, and the lines of consent in queer relationships. From an industry perspective, it also continues to raise questions about straight actors playing gay roles. Below, Them editor Samantha Allen discusses these issues and more with contributors Naveen Kumar and Abby Monteil.
Note: This discussion contains spoilers for Tár.
Samantha Allen: Tár was perhaps the shortest two hours and 38 minutes of my moviegoing life. The film unfolds both with a sort of methodical precision and with a rousing élan. In that way, I suppose, it’s like a well-conducted piece of music, to choose the obvious metaphor — precise but not unfeeling, procedural and yet ineffable. I loved it. Before we get into details, what did you both make of the film?
Naveen Kumar: I was totally captivated by it. The first time I saw Tár with a notebook, I could hardly look away long enough to write anything down. I’m not very well-versed in classical music, and one thing I loved about this movie is that it doesn’t expect you to have prior knowledge in order to appreciate it. I agree that it seems to unfold like a beautifully (and brutally) orchestrated piece of music.
Abby Monteil: I chose to go into this movie pretty cold, apart from the knowledge that the Blair Witch screams would be used during a jogging scene (yes, really), and I’m really glad I did. Tár has been dubbed a “cancel culture” story, but what I was most taken with was the film’s character study of how someone like Lydia becomes convinced she’s an invincible genius, and what facets of her identity remain when that’s all been toppled.
I was reminded after seeing Tár that director Todd Field has close ties to Stanley Kubrick, who directed him in his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. You can feel the late, controversial auteur in Lydia Tár’s meticulously arranged world, which does operate with the tight cadence of a top-tier orchestra… until it doesn’t, and the film’s shift into almost psychological thriller territory feels earned by all the groundwork it’s laid up until that point.
I’m always grateful when a movie treats contemporary audiences as smart enough to hang onto all the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details that Tár is brimming with. But most importantly, I walked away wondering: What the hell did Lydia Tár win her EGOT for?
SA: I personally choose to believe she composed an original song for a Smurfs movie sequel.
I think Cate Blanchett is obviously riveting, in ways that feel almost foolish to try to articulate, but here goes nothing! I think the film leverages her uncontainable charisma in this fascinating way, putting the viewer totally in her thrall at the start and then making you wince with embarrassment and shame for her by the end.
In our culture more generally, I’ve been suspicious lately of a sort of confusion of beauty for moral correctness — that, historically speaking, leads down some pretty dark, fascistic avenues — and this film, among other things, felt like a debunking of that notion. Like, how can we take one of the world’s most attractive people and render her monstrous? What did you think of the performance?
AM: Cate Blanchett has played no shortage of commanding female characters throughout her career — Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator and Queen Elizabeth in Elizabeth: The Golden Age come to mind. But part of what I found so compelling about Blanchett’s magnetic performance in Tár is her ability to play to and against type.
The laundry list of Lydia’s achievements that we hear about in the opening scene primes us for another Blanchett “Great Woman” role. Then, almost immediately, the film begins showing the cracks in that facade, and revealing how much of Lydia’s celebrity and genius is as intensively curated as the orchestras she conducts — and yes, being a wealthy, perfectly coiffed white woman with the literal cheekbones of a Middle Earth elf is an integral part of that curated image.
NK: Not to fall into the trap of Blanchett’s beauty, but this movie is really about cheekbones to me as much as anything else. I would say I’m kidding, but I still see them every time I close my eyes at night. Her performance does have some quirks that I didn't quite understand (how many vowel sounds does it take to light a candle?), but overall, I found it totally masterful — an enthralling portrait of a brilliant, fastidious artist whose prowess animates every aspect of her life.
How many more chic, complicated, and compelling lesbians can Hollywood write for Blanchett to play? That is a trick question, because the limit does not exist; I would devour them all. Which does make me wonder why she is such a clear exception in the ongoing, and increasingly contentious, debates over who gets to play queer characters on screen.
SA: To me — and speaking only for myself, since I know feelings on this topic run hot — there’s a bit of a “smell test” aspect to this. Blanchett once said she’s been in “relationships” with women, and then later walked back that comment, or said she had been misquoted, but even before that whole game of telephone, she has long exuded an eroticism that just feels queer. I know it sounds hypocritical to say that some straight actors can play gay and some can’t, but sometimes I believe a straight woman kissing another woman on the mouth and sometimes I see the strain.
NK: It’s also clear from her performances, in Carol and now Tár, that her queer characters are immensely layered and complex, and that she’s not taking on these roles so that folks might point to them and say, “What a transformation!” Their queerness is just one aspect of who they are, and there’s a richness to the narratives of both films that transcends a lot of other prestige films cast with A-list stars who are not openly queer.
AM: Yeah, problems definitely arise when actors make a major show of “transforming” into a queer character in a clear awards season bid, rather than seeking to embody a role with as much nuance and authenticity as possible. I think ensuring that the latter happens is ultimately much more useful than often-tedious discourse around real-life “queerbaiting,” which can take away from more interesting conversations surrounding queer stories onscreen at best, and pressure actors into coming out before they’re ready at worst.
Of course, a trans character being played by a cis actor is another matter entirely, given that it denies already vanishingly rare opportunities to talented trans performers and can — as Jen Richards notably pointed out in the documentary Disclosure — contribute to ongoing violence against trans people, particularly trans women.
When it comes to Blanchett in particular, I do agree with Samantha that she gives off an effortless eroticism that just feels queer. That ineffable quality is interesting to observe in the character of Lydia, someone who is so used to weaponizing elements of her own identity — whether she’s drawing attention to her female conductor firsts as often as Universal reminded us that Bros was the first gay studio rom-com, or quipping that she’s a “U-Haul lesbian” before eviscerating a Julliard student of color for their resistance to Bach.
SA: I do want to bring up that this is a #MeToo film. Tár has received plenty of praise for the central performance, and for its depiction of the classical music world, but some critics have said, in essence, “Well, what’s the point of simply showing that lesbians can be monsters, too?” Where did you both land on that aspect of the movie?
Because we never really meet Krista Taylor onscreen, nor do we flash back to Tár’s relationship with her, I saw it less as a film about morally condemning her actions in a way that makes a particular point of the conductor’s gender, and more as a story about how anyone in power might work to cover their tracks. Her actions are of course inflected by her womanhood, and by her queerness, but the underlying defense mechanisms are as universal as the human ego.
AM: I would argue that, although we never meet one of Lydia’s victims onscreen, these women haunt the screen long before any of these allegations are explicitly brought up onscreen — think of the faceless woman watching Lydia from the New Yorker Festival, or the fact that we meet a slumbering Lydia through an iPhone through which a then-anonymous young woman is distrustfully live-streaming
Tár’s setting within the upper echelons of classical music feels key, too. Lydia might have broken ground within that world as a lesbian woman, but what does that “representation” mean when she’s still wielding her abusive power and ego within an institution that was already designed to concentrate acclaim and prestige in the hands of a select few?
I think it also effectively skewers the tokenization of successful people of marginalized identities, which can be quite reductive when we discuss abuses of power and consent that don’t fit neatly into stereotypically cis-, white-, and male-dominated situations. If we can’t make room for larger conversations about how those violations can unfold differently in regards to women, in regards to queer people, the larger conversation defaults back to this binary, reductive understanding of right and wrong. Because the character and world-building in Tár feels so real, its Me Too story manages to transcend those visibility trappings.
NK: It’s a fascinating maneuver, to look at how professional and artistic power can seep into personal conduct and relationships, through the lens of a woman and a lesbian in this case. Boundaries between right and wrong would likely seem more black-and-white were her character a man, as these stories so often tend to go, on screen and in real life. It all would have felt very predictable.
The film also shows how the dynamics of consent between two women can look quite different. Lydia’s assistant Francesca (my queen, Noémie Merlant) shares a kind of intimacy with her that obviously exceeds conventional professional boundaries. And it seems at first like they’re copasetic with each other, until events unfold later in the film. The movie keeps us at arm’s length from the details of Lydia’s relationships with her protégés, which is part of what makes the storytelling so magnetic.
SA: So many artistic and intellectual spheres are incredibly intimate in a way that can obscure how hierarchical they are when push comes to shove. There’s this bracing feeling of having the freedom to explore beauty and ideas that can feel heady, and indeed erotic, but when interpersonal conflict inevitably arises, the gears of power start to turn more predictably, and suddenly a mentor becomes an enemy. I love how Tár captured that tension between ambiguity and clarity: we don’t get some kind of omniscient perspective on Lydia’s past behavior, though we certainly see a certain pattern start to play out again with the young cellist (Sophie Kauer). But we are shown, quite starkly and clinically, the emails she has sent to shore up her position when those relationships fall under scrutiny.
AM: Watching Merlant and Blanchett on-screen together is my multiverse of madness.
I was also fascinated by the film’s decision to show Lydia co-parenting a young daughter, Petra, whom her wife Sharon describes as the only person with whom she has a non-transactional relationship. But Lydia’s sense of authority and entitlement trickles down to this queer mother-daughter relationship in interesting ways, like when she finds Petra trying to give all of her stuffed animals “conducting batons,” and reminds her that an orchestra is not a democracy. Or when she introduces herself as Petra’s “father” to her daughter’s school bully and threatens to get her. That hierarchy truly seeps into every corner of life! If Cate Blanchett had cornered me in the schoolyard as a 7-year-old, I would’ve simply disintegrated then and there.
SA: To end on a less serious note, I have to say that part of what makes the film feel so inhabited are all the details: the VOSS water, the tailored suits, the cucumber salad, and even the rampant use of the medication metoprolol. I’m actually prescribed it for heart problems and my cardiac surgeon once told me that musicians often use it to keep their hands from shaking, or to calm down before a performance. So when I saw Cate Blanchett slamming down those white pills, I was like, “Wow, this Todd Field guy has done his homework!” What were some of your favorite touches?
NK: Is it weird that I’m kinda jealous of your heart medication? Also, I need to know, is the cucumber salad made with vinegar and dill or like, miso and sesame? These are the details that keep me up at night, and judging by the internet in the weeks since Tár’s release, I’m not alone. But there is nothing I’ve thought about more than the undoubtedly sensational and impenetrable stage musical for which Lydia won her Tony Award.
That’s the other thing about this movie, it creates a fictional world so utterly convincing that we all would rather live inside of it than our own. I can’t tell you how many people have confessed to me that they thought Lydia Tár was an actual person (and so did I!). At this point, I would argue that Lydia Tár is in fact the only thing that’s real, and it's the rest of us who are playing pretend.
AM: Is Lydia Tár a monster? Yes. Do I need to own one of her impeccably tailored lesbian power suits as soon as humanly possible? A thousand times yes.
And although the ending has proved to be somewhat controversial, I found myself cackling at the final reveal that Lydia has found herself conducting a Monster Hunter concert — where, as a friend of mine pointed out, she’s arguably never conducted for an audience that is as passionate about the music as those Monster Hunter fans are. Is there a sliver of Lydia that’s just as passionate about making music, even for video game fans, as she is commanding people’s attention? Maybe. I’m only really rooting for the Monster Hunter fans, anyway.
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