[imagesource: Universal Pictures]

Cate Blanchett took home a Best Actress Award at the recent Golden Globes for her “piercing” performance in TÁR.

Blanchett stars as Lydia Tár, a narcissistic orchestra conductor, who The Guardian reckons was the only person capable of delivering “the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany”.

The Todd Field film has been described as an “entirely outrageous, delirious and sensual psychodrama” in the publication’s rare five-star review, noting how Blanchett’s performance “will pierce you like a conductor’s baton through the heart”.

That is an appropriate metaphor for this artsy, surreal and terribly mysterious film.

The synopsis goes something like this:

Tár is imagined to be the principal conductor of a major German orchestra, addressed by colleagues as “maestro”. She is passionate, demanding, autocratic, with a rockstar prestige and an international touring lifestyle approaching that of the super-rich, and is in a live-in relationship with her first violinist, played by Nina Hoss, with whom she has a child.

Interestingly, real-life conductor Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, called out the film for drawing parallels to her own life and Tár’s.

Here’s the trailer:

All is good and well until Tár starts to unravel and become unhinged, with problems like stalking, identity politics, and ideological head-butting to move the plot along:

But this movie is not about anything as banal as “cancellation”. Tár suspects that there is something wrong: she is twitchy, paranoid and insomniac. We know from the outset that she is effectively being spied on. There are strange sounds, intrusions and things out of place. And the music itself amplifies the violence just beneath the surface.

It could be that Field has fallen under the spell of the maestro himself, Austrian director Michael Haneke, with the refrigerated sleekness of the film’s look and the ideas about revenge-surveillance, the return of the repressed and the tyranny and cruelty in the classical music tradition.

Fascinating.

TÁR will be released in cinemas tomorrow, January 13, in the UK.

[source:guardian]