A few weeks ago I watched this excellent analysis from Maggie Mae Fish on Todd Field’s Tár and the importance of time. She teased out the many layers of meaning regarding this theme and the film. Her analysis made me want to rewatch Tár right away and think more deeply about how time functions in the film. I did this by timing, as best I could, the length of each scene. I recalled that several of the most notable scenes—the opening interview, the discourse at Julliard—were quite lengthy, but what I came to realize in the process of breaking down the film scene by scene is that it is absolutely full of scenes that run short of a minute. Occasionally there are scenes closer to 10 seconds, a flash of an idea that the film asks you to take in very quickly.
I’ll say at the outset that though I really enjoyed Tár the first time I watched it about two months ago, I didn’t grasp much of the intricacy of the film until this second watch. It’s a film, like Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite (2019), that really forces one to watch it multiple times in order to make the components of the film work together. As a film, it really is like a finely crafted piece of music with long scenes framed by others that are more like staccato bursts.
The narrative of Tár, which is now streaming on Peacock in the US, is quite simple. The film follows Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), who I will refer to as Lydia to avoid excessive confusion of her name with the film, an accomplished conductor now heading the world-renown orchestra in Berlin. She is on the verge of completing two career milestones: conducting Mahler’s Fifth for a live recording and publishing her book bizarrely named Tár on Tár. As she inches closer to these career-defining accomplishments, a story gradually emerges about a former protégé of Lydia’s, Krista Taylor. The story alleges that Lydia had inappropriate relations with Krista, likely playing some role in Krista’s eventual death by suicide. Tár is subtle about this, weaving little hints into the story and mostly relying on the facial reactions of other characters—Lydia’s wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss), and her assistant/current protégé, Francesca (Noémie Merlant). The story does catch up with her, as we suspect it will, leaving her life in shambles. Her book launch is scaled back, and she goes to the Philippines to “reset” her career. The film ends with her conducting video game music for a live event.
This summary does reveal the plot of Tár if you haven’t seen it, but it does essentially nothing to lessen the complex pleasures of the film. A lot of this plot trajectory is pretty obvious. We’ve seen it before, even in the context of music in films like Whiplash (Chazelle, 2014). What makes Tár uniquely effective as a film in this vein is Lydia’s source of fear and anxiety.
To put it bluntly, unlike so many prominent people now, Lydia does not fear a “woke mob” or “cancel culture.” This alone is noteworthy because she does have similarities to TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists). She speaks out against “gender spectacle” and her most heated encounter (though not the most violent) is with a pangender character named Max (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist). But Lydia does not fear being “cancelled” because she believes, quite devoutly, that her music conducting stands on its own. This is a complication of the art vs artist debate so often addressed (like I did here and my colleague did here). Lydia is not Mahler. Her composition skills are somewhere between pedestrian and laughable. She’s also not much of a musician. We only see her play music a few times. Once she models a simple piece of Bach similar to how you would find it in an early-level piano book. She also plays the accordion dissonantly. She is attempting to compose something, but when her new protégé-to-be Olga (Sophie Kauer) sees it and plays it, Olga recognizes immediately where an A should be a B-flat. Lydia is not good at writing music and, from what we’ve seen, there’s no reason to think she’s very good at playing it. Her reputation as an “artist” is solely based on conducting where the task is to “translate” the music.
The film does not suggest that Lydia is a bad conductor or say that there isn’t an art to conducting. But Lydia-as-conductor does add a level of distance to the art vs artist question. This is not the question of if we should discard the work of a given composer (or anyone else like Michael Jackson) on the basis of criminal or moral misdeeds. No, this is about the much more fungible matter of translation.
My point is that unlike many contemporary cultural figures of prominence—and even Lydia’s male peers in the film—Lydia does not fear being cancelled. What she does fear is time. Maggie Mae Fish and others have already made this point, but it’s one I also want to dwell on as I see the theme of time as something that structures the film while also driving home its message about the abuse of power. As Lydia’s job as a conductor is to keep time, our job as viewers attempting to understand Tár, is to understand how time works within the film.
For the purposes of this essay, I’m most interested in how time works as a structuring agent in Tár, and how it works to highlight the film’s #MeToo themes (see Monica Hesse’s article for The Washington Post and others). I’ll move back and forth between these concepts—film structure, #MeToo narrative—as I work through the beats of the film.
By my count, the word “time” appears 20 times in Tár, but what is even more interesting than that, is that 17 of these uses are in the first half-hour. The three that follow this are much more impactful and specific than the flippant uses of “time” early on, several of which are said by Lydia in the same answer to an interview question.
This interview is the first major sequence of the film, but it’s not where the film starts. We start with about 30 seconds of a cell phone and cryptic texts on it, dropping the first hint of the sexual impropriety storyline and the idea that a great portion of this storyline will be mediated by technology (especially emails).
This does not give way to the main action of the film but rather to nearly 4 minutes of credits. The print on the credits is small and very similar to that of album liner notes. As credits usually do, they lead to a declaration of Todd Field as the director, but his name is very small, thoroughly swamped by the blackness of the screen around him. The image is striking when you think of it in context to much flashier opening titles. It downplays his role, as his name is basically the same size as that of all the other crew members (actor credits run after the film, interestingly enough). These credits also get us thinking about the process of creation, a theme also emphasized by the field recordings “captured” by Lydia that play in the background, and the next scene that opens with the fine crafting of Lydia’s suit.
Then we get to the real start of the movie, a rather lengthy interview between Lydia and someone putting on this conductor spotlight at The New Yorker festival. This interview runs about 12 minutes when including a few shots before it of suit making while we hear the interviewer’s introduction—an impersonal one that Francesca has large parts of memorized.
The first nearly 17 minutes of this movie are small credits on a black screen and an on-stage interview. As such, structurally, the film has already made the viewers aware of time. Anything we might think of as “action” seems to be nowhere to be found for quite a while. But this interview is vitally important, setting up the whole film even if it conveys it just through dialogue. Here we get emphasis on “sexual distinctions” and Lydia’s use of the phrase “gender spectacle.” It’s a key phrase because Lydia is all about performance, saying she doesn’t read reviews which we see later is a clear lie. She also performs that sexism doesn’t affect her, citing many real women who have spoken out against rampant sexism in classical music (Maggie Mae Fish makes this point more thoroughly in the video essay cited above). But, having now ascended to the highest heights, she wishes to act like gender doesn’t matter and that the “spectacle” surrounding it is overblown. She has aligned herself with the Boys Club of classical music.
In this interview, we further see Lydia’s character, as she interrupts her interviewer saying “No, that’s right.” This simple line is a powerful one as it shows Lydia interrupting, and agreeing, with someone but framing that agreement in terms of disagreement. The “No” emphasizes that she is the one in control here, agreeing with the interview in a hostile and combative way. She sees herself, quite literally, as the God, of her orchestra and also her life, waxing on about how it is her job, as the conductor, to start time for the orchestra. She highlights how the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth are on the downbeat, creating a “note” that is silent and in her control. In conducting the Fifth, she quite literally starts the universe of the piece from a place of silence, “creating” the song ex nihilo, a musical Big Bang.
The interview ends with Lydia noting that when Bernstein, her mentor and someone credited with saving Mahler from obscurity (so, again, Lydia is just doing what others have done before her), played for Robert Kennedy’s funeral the piece he played ran 12 minutes done “like a Mass.” This is a religious idea paired with the scene’s sense of her as God, but also the scene we just watched ran about 12 minutes. That makes this interview aligned with that funeral “Mass.” Tár is full of such subtleties, but this one is particularly important. Lydia mentions a piece of music that was played for 12 minutes at a funeral, described by her as “like a Mass.” She does so in a 12-minute scene. This makes viewers aware, again, of time—which she also just mentioned a dozen times. But more than that, it makes the interview a sermon. Her mentor enacted a Mass at an actual funeral and with actual music. Lydia enacts it with words, many of them empty, in a conference hall.
I spend perhaps too long on this point because such a comparison also brings the prominence of death to the film. If this is Tár’s version of the Kennedy “Mass,” with Lydia as the version of Bernstein, where is the death?
Death in Tár, like time, seems to be predominantly two-fold. At the most obvious level, there is Lydia’s impending “career death,” and this interview does turn out to be her last flashy non-controversial public appearance. There is also the literal death of Krista Taylor. The two are related as Krista’s death will lead to Lydia’s career death. Krista is not dead for the first part of the film, but it seems like she already is, communicating through a mysterious book gifted to Lydia—it arrives while Lydia is far from her permanent address—and emails. Lydia rejects the book, shoving it away in an airport bathroom before returning to her seat and puzzling over the name “Krista Taylor” as if searching it for anagrams. It’s a brief moment and a confusing one. I think that this suggests viewers do likewise and realize that “TAR” can be found in Krista (k-R-i-s-T-A) and “Taylor” (T-A-y-l-o-R). As such we see Krista as someone almost embedded within Lydia.
Or put another way, Krista, the embodiment of death in the film, is haunting Lydia. Her allegations against Lydia are a timebomb threatening to blow up Lydia’s life, eating away at Lydia’s sense that she can control time. In contrast to the early part of the film which is anchored by long scenes, the middle is frenetic with many scenes lasting under two minutes. Several of these scenes show Lydia running to escape her apartment where, as she will soon learn, her neighbor recently died. Death is pursuing her.
This culminates in one of the film’s most surreal sequences. After the death by suicide of Krista, and after not getting an all-but-promised promotion, Francesca quits, realizing that Lydia will not help her and could end up killing her. The new protégé-to-be is Olga, a young cellist who Lydia is already grooming via favors and orchestra machinations. Lydia is giving Olga a ride home when Olga leaves a teddy bear—yes, it doesn’t make much sense that she has this—in Lydia’s car, so Lydia gets out to give it to her. She gets lost trying to find Olga’s apartment and wanders down to an underground tunnel where, startled by a noise, she runs away and falls on the steps. This sequence strains plausibility but emphasizes how something—death, time, allegations—is in hot pursuit of Lydia, and has almost caught her.
In telling people—her wife Sharon and then the orchestra—about this injury, Lydia says that she was “attacked.” On one level, she wasn’t. She fell down on some steps. But on another level she was attacked by a specter of time and death chasing her, her own misdeeds catching up to her at last. As such this middle section of the film also uses time as a major structuring force, even as the scenes are shorter, propelling the film toward the inevitable fall—literally—from grace. We are still thinking of time—often literally, through shots of metronomes—and time is very much not in Lydia’s control. Such sequences also show how time as it relates to #MeToo narrative is also getting closer.
