Tár (Todd Field 2022) What is music? is it, as conductor Marin Alsop would have it, a force of unity, or as director Todd Field suggests through the character of fictional conductor Lydia Tár, a configuration of power? Field’s movie and Cate Blanchett’s performance as Tár, a reptilian celebrity conductor, has been heaped with praise, whispering of inevitable future awards; Blanchett already got a Golden Globe for the role. Critics love her. In The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey says Blanchett’s performance’ functions as a total culmination’, And Danny Leigh in the Financial Times describes her as ‘wildly magnetic’. Arguably, in fact, Blanchett delivers the overperformance of a lifetime, where an Instagram authenticity is rendered manicured and stylised, every gesture inflected with a twitch, every line delivered with a pause for facial rigor mortis to signal calculation, the words of an actress. But — what does Blanchett’s character represent?
