There’s a lot to recommend about 2022’s Tár: Cate Blanchett is in every scene,1 evocative and spooky sound design, formal rigour, a perfect ending.
Prior to Tár director Todd Field only made two (also great) features: In The Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2006). It’s been a while since I’ve seen either, but I remember them as fairly straightforward experiences. By contrast Tár is elliptical, by which I mean the movie skips around and invites us to fill in gaps and create meaning for ourselves.
The film opens with our anti-hero, Lydia Tár, interviewed about the nature of her work as a conductor, which is, as she puts it, to work with time. Movies, famously, do this as well. Andre Tarkovsky called his book on film Sculpting With Time. (Tár…Tarkovsky…it can’t be a coincidence!) A film editor’s primary responsibility is deciding when things happen, and movies, unlike novels, require a total submission to the pace the editor sets. We all watch a movie at the same speed, whereas a novel or even a poem is experienced at each reader’s peculiar rate.
In Tár, Field sculpts with time more ostentatiously than the average mainstream American director, slowing it down through long, static shots and the aforementioned interview that goes on at some length, or jumping past events other filmmakers might dramatize. Field even rolls the full credits right off the top, which in the era of the ‘skip credits’ button comes off as an audacious delay. All this playing with time is disorienting but pleasurably so, like a particularly evocative dream.
As someone with a long-standing interest in, for lack of a better term, art movies, I’m used to varying amounts of disorientation. I think cinematic ellipses, or narrative gaps, are commonly deployed in these types of films because they provide the audience with opportunities for both interpretation and imagination. Commercial narrative art generally avoids relying on either of these things, because they are forms of intellectual work and many people find that work difficult and off-putting. And if you’re tired and looking to be soothed or distracted, it certainly can be! But this kind of participation in the creation of meaning can also be one of the great pleasures of art. It gives you something to think and talk about, and provides grist for secondary texts like this one. More simplistic forms of storytelling, if they’re done well, provide immediate pleasure but leave you with nothing to do, during or after the experience of consuming them. (No shade to simplicity—it has its place and I genuinely love a good comedy, mystery, thriller, adventure, etc.).
“The dream is that there's going to be enough room for anyone to come in and be the final filmmaker. I’d love to hear when people attack the film for their own reasons. That interests me too. There’s no wrong way to read the film. The film is meant to inspire as ferocious or as superfluous speculation as possible, or opinions as possible because that is the only intent behind it.” (Todd Field, from this interview with Vanity Fair)
Tár has caught the commentariat’s imagination. I’ve seen many, many essays and posts that attempt to fill in the missing pieces of the film. Give ‘Tár ending’ a Google and you’ll see what I mean. A similar but distinct process happens with “puzzle” shows like Westworld or Lost, as fandoms parse clues from each episode on social media. The distinction is that these shows operate under the idea of there being a solution, as opposed to movies like Tàr, which cannot be solved, only interpreted.
I don’t believe there’s a way to correctly or accurately interpret a work of art, though some interpretations are certainly more convincing than others. Is Lydia Tár dead or in some kind of dream-state for the final third of the movie? I don’t think so, but it’s nice to finally have a movie that allows for those kinds of big (if clichéd) interpretive swings.
David Lynch, who I love, refuses to ever explain anything about his movies. In Catching the Big Fish, his wonderful book on creativity and (less interestingly) transcendental meditation, there’s a brief chapter where he admits, re: a symbolic blue key prominently featured in Mulholland Drive, that he has no idea what it means. In other words, movies can also be open to interpretation for the creators themselves. This kind of openness to meaning used to be more common in mainstream adult filmmaking,2 and in storytelling more generally. Movies like Tár are a rare thing at the multiplex, and I’m so grateful that Field, who’s been paying his bills directing commercials for the past 16 years, had the opportunity to make it.
Maybe not every scene, but it certainly feels that way.
I keep emphasizing ‘mainstream’ and ‘American’ because film festivals and streaming services are full of independent and foreign films that go much farther than Tár in their demands on audiences’ patience and interpretive ability. I watched two Tarkovsky movies last year, and both felt like exercises in endurance. Tár, by contrast, is genuinely a fun, thrilling watch. It even has some big laughs!