Tár is the classical music equivalent of a film about Ireland that wallows in cliches

It’s actually quite easy to see why Todd Field’s Tár has had such widely differing responses. It’s almost as if the film were designed to split audiences into those that have an understanding of the workings of the world of classical music and those who don’t. A lot of us imagine we know the worlds of murderers, criminals, spies, lawyers, kings, queens and celebrities, when all we know is just what films and TV – and more recently social media – suggest to us.

So, if you’re new to the vernacular of classical musicians, or the nature of power-play within their profession, you may well take the veracity of the world Tár portrays at face value.

The film makes clear right away that the high-achieving Lydia Tár is a very unpleasant person. Even the list of positions she’s held in her glittering career path suggests the success of a serial divorcee rather than someone who knows how to build significant creative bonds. She’s arrogant, pretentious, controlling, condescending.

She’s a conductor, but she doesn’t talk like a musician. She teaches, and raises valid points when challenging students, but in an unnecessarily aggressive way. She ends relationships with the ease of someone tossing a tissue into a rubbish bin. She meddles with her wife’s medication. She threatens a schoolgirl by using the techniques of abusers. And she usurps the democratic process of the Berlin Philharmonic, where we are to believe she is principal conductor, even to the point of favouring a candidate she fancies in a toilet and who she later recognises from her footwear in a supposedly “blind” audition.

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What’s to object to about all of that? A movie villain is a movie villain, not a real person. But just turn the tables for a moment. Imagine a film about Ireland, Irish people or Irish culture that trots out cliches old and new, and you might well be as annoyed as anyone taking issue with Tár for its representation of conductors and classical music, not to mention a self-confessed “U-Haul lesbian”. There are lots of films from and about Ireland. Tár is singular. But unlike, say Borat, it seems blissfully unaware of its own caricatures.

[ Tár: Cate Blanchett in full symphonic mode in role tailored to her strengths ]

It’s true, of course, that classical music does have its villains, among conductors, among teachers, among agents, among institutions. That’s true in Ireland as well as everywhere else. Look no further than Irish Theatre Institute’s Speak Up report, published in 2021. The key findings included the fact that “There are indications that there is a culture of harmful workplace behaviours across all sectors of the arts in Ireland” and “The majority of those surveyed have experienced (70 per cent) and witnessed (53 per cent) harmful behaviour.” The stats for opera are significantly worse, behind only those for dance.

Tár deals with a very real issue here, and raises others about gender politics (her own views are jaw-droppingly blind to the reality of gender imbalances), back-stabbing and cancel-culture. But actor Cate Blanchett’s handling of all of this is out of the tired playbook of cocking a snook at high-achieving artists and intellectuals for their perceived remoteness, vanity, wilfulness, pompousness and intolerance of even remote rivals. To be fair, many of the lines she’s given might have come from the output of some kind of AI bot that meticulously jumbles originally meaningful observations.

Yes. Of course. It’s a film. It’s a fiction, based on the new reality that there’s a growing cohort of successful woman conductors and composers. It’s making a point that there are bad eggs at high levels in the world of music. That there are women who abuse power. But it’s really only when the main character goes off the rails, starts having hallucinations and nightmares, and takes the viewer into theterritory of horror that the film begins to cohere, albeit in a horror film sort of way.

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Lydia Tár loses everything. The film makes clear that her violin-playing wife, leader of the Berlin Philharmonic, helped her get the principal conductorship. But when her misdeeds catch up with her, the brilliantly calculating woman who manipulated herself into the top job tries to solve her problems by rushing on to the stage during a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony to attack the man who has replaced her – a parody of the wealthy amateur, Gilbert Kaplan, who only ever conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony. Eek!

Maybe Field should think about a cuckolded husband sitting in the front row at the opera and taking out a riding whip to beat the conductor who is only a matter of feet in front of him. At least that happened – to Otto Klemperer in Vienna over his interest in soprano Elisabeth Schumann. Truth is stranger than fiction.