Tàr is a very good film in many ways.
A woman of working-class origin becomes a highly accomplished, lionized classical music conductor and then, as certain successful men have done, the focus of a media scandal for apparently abusive behavior toward a younger female employee. Todd Field’s meticulous set design, lighting, camera work and soundtrack let us in on the many tactile sensations of Lydia Tàr’s subsequent downfall in terms of career, marriage, family, psychology and self-worth. All of which unravel to the inexorable beat of the composer’s metronome as it keeps time with Tàr's excruciatingly choreographed podium antics that break entirely with any sense of ‘lady conducting’ - with the character’s whole libido immersed, it reinforces the plot to dispense with any remaining gender cliches.
The tragedy build up holistically from then on, but to get to it, it is first necessary to pass through 20 minutes of semi-comprehensible pseudo-intellectual-babble that I found extremely annoying. I say that this flow of uber-cerebral pontification was semi-incomprehensible, which is much worse than being utterly incomprehensible. Understanding nothing enables you to switch off completely, but here the sentences were peppered with fairly informed ideas and phrases that hooked me briefly before turning up obtuse and laborious pathways. After a brief sense of disappointment for not being 'refined' enough to ‘get it’, I remembered I'd been working with these kinds of subject matter for a very long time, and the real truth emerged; most of it was meaningless.
For those coming from outside the ‘intellectual’ world, tracts like these are like taking a machine gun to any real intellectual content in music and the arts and shooting it dead. Those unsure of themselves in this domain might soldier on with it until frozen out by boredom and demoralisation. Which is the only role language of this kind serves.
And this tendency is alive and flourishing everywhere, in many disciplines. In academia there are peer reviewed texts and even books that actually rely on difficult phrasing (not the same as trying to explain something that actually is difficult) as a cover up for having nothing to say and/or not really knowing how to say it. The sum-total of this is an enormously destructive and reactionary thing, the construction of a mind ghetto that locks down thinking and the permeation of it by those coming from the outside.
Nevertheless, Tàr struck a chord with me because the writer/director brings these issues up and points them out as so few films do, but I can’t really decide if this is highlighting the problem or fuelling it, because there are almost no films that go beyond this level - that have intellectual aspects that are sincerely conveyed - and this film seems to stay on that side of the line.
Another recent film about classical music, Maestro, suffered similarly with a focus on the private life of Leonard Bernstein at the almost total expense of any allusion to the ideas, concepts and thinking that went into his work. Which is strange because Leonard Bernstein himself went to great lengths to at least try to explain his music, he talked about its structure and syntax, and its beautiful link to other disciplines such as language, in an ‘ordinary’ lay-person fashion. So Bernstein had some concern with breaking down barriers between the intellectual hierarchy and the simply explained, and therefore between class and ideology. But none of this is alluded to in the movie, it is replaced by a forensic examination of the composer's familial and extra familial life. As with Tàr, this was a great missed opportunity to broach some fascinating aspects of music; the esoteric ivory tower of the profession and the supposed loftiness of the ‘great composer’ and to convey some of the more material and formal elements of the medium that inform the composer’s practice and the conductor’s interpretation.
Examples of an overriding
tendency to keep the film-going public away from anything that might be a bit
informative. But the best works, even in philosophy and science are usually well
written and not so hard to understand, sometimes with a little effort, because
they have thematic integrity and ideas, not very like the ‘intellectuals’ in these films.
