'Tár' review: Cate Blanchett at the top of her game

LE MONDE'S VIEW – A MASTERPIECE

It's been a while since an arthouse film aroused so much passion among the public, or since a fictional character has sparked so much enthusiasm and commentary. Since Tár's release in American theaters, some have proposed out-there interpretations of the film's ending. Others have opposed the misogynistic portrait of Lydia Tár, the brilliant conductor at the peak of her career for whom the film is named. However, this is not a biopic: Tár is simply a fictional character powerful enough to make you want to go and read her Wikipedia page after the screening.

Her character is so realistic because its creator, Todd Field, has been mulling it over for a decade. Field is primarily an actor, and has also directed two feature films. The most recent film he directed, Little Children (2006), came out 17 years ago. Field then worked extensively in advertising before managing to produce this movie, tailor-made for Cate Blanchett.

The film opens with images that foreshadow the movie's subject: an army of little hands busy making a custom suit for the great Tár. The opening is a form of preparation for the actress who will play a monster of intelligence, talent and self-control for two and a half hours. The celebrated genius enjoys the best that western culture has to offer: murmured conversations in large, softly-lit restaurants; name-dropping at a prestigious music school; concerts in the best venues; stops in hotel rooms all over the world, and between them, a train, a plane, a cab. The world is a large, hushed theater in muted colors, without limits or obstacles. It is a world for Tár.

The power of repression

The extent to which the actress and the character blend together – the extent to which Blanchett and her flawless style thrive in this role, her best yet – is worthy of note. Her lucid acting, her deep voice and her rhythmic phrasing are hypnotizing. They make for a great performance in and of themselves. Blanchette is the metronome of every scene. Watching her brings to mind Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke's The Pianist (2001), another great movie by a half-human, half-machine-like actress that used the classical music world to represent the utmost degree of civilized sophistication. As with Haneke, Field chose this world for the power of its repression.

After portraying his heroine's ego, Field pierces it with tiny holes

After portraying his heroine's ego (a master class, updates to her Wikipedia page, swooning fans), Field pierces it with tiny holes. During a course at Juilliard, she is confronted with a student who bluntly says he is not interested in the great misogynist Bach. Tár takes the opportunity to make a stunning judgment, all witty words and devastating retort: "Unfortunately, the architect of your soul appears to be social media." The exchange is brilliant. Field walks a tightrope while managing to remain invisible. He does not spout off against woke culture; his heroine does. The student leaves the room, then spits, "You're a real bitch."

A series of events confirms this intuition. Tár is scheming to hire a musician who has caught her eye and is doing everything possible to hide the suicide of a scholarship student who had been under her sway. A small circle of relatives and assistants are powerless witnesses to the unpunished abuses of a woman too exceptional to submit to society's judgments – which she prefers to God's.

But Tár is not a movie that theorizes about cancel culture. It poetically captures the spirit of our time and draws from it a new way of storytelling. Above all, it leaves viewers alone, free to make their own opinions and to lose their bearings without knowing what the next scene will be. This type of wandering is a gift that has become too rare in cinema.

Impalpable violence

Field comments on who we are with boundless mischief. He observes the world from the viewpoint of an artist stuck in her megalomaniac bubble and filled with a sense of impunity. Apart from her narcissism, everything seems unrealistic – beginning with her own violence, which is filmed as something impalpable and intangible. The movie embodies this great denial by ushering all violence off-screen.

Field gives Tár a characteristic that represents her relationship to the world: she is hypersensitive to noise. The musician is regularly bothered by an unusual, parasitic noise. She leaves her comfort zone to search for its origin, following the cry of a woman at the edge of a forest and exploring deep inside the bowels of a building. In these beautiful scenes suffused with surrealism, a certain metaphysical anguish plays out. The artist dizzily senses that a wild world exists outside her egotistical bubble.

It is in these small detours that the film reveals its ambition. Tár is a conceptual character made in our image. The world is no longer a plot that we share, but a kind of persistent tinnitus into which the heroine will end up disappearing.