Tàr is a very good film in many ways.
There is a very unusual central character, I haven't heard of many of these, a lionized female classical music conductor. Lydia Tàr is also a woman of working-class origin, who in her star capacity, and like a number of men stars before her, becomes the focus of a media scandal for her abusive behavior toward a younger female employee.
Meticulous set design, lighting, camera work and soundtrack allow us to share the tactile sensations of Tàr’s subsequent downfall in terms of career, marriage, family, psychology and self-worth. These unravel to the inexorable beat of the composer’s metronome, and to Tàr's dramatic and bold podium movements that break entirely with any sense of ‘lady conducting’.
The tragedy builds up holistically, but to get to it we must first pass through 20 minutes of semi-comprehensible pseudo-intellectual-babble. The fact that this drone was semi-incomprehensible made it much worse than being utterly incomprehensible which would have allowed you to switch off completely. Here the sentences were peppered with half formed ideas that hooked me briefly before turning up irritating obtuse alleyways. After a brief sense of disappointment for not being 'refined' enough to ‘get it’, the real truth emerged; it was actually fairly meaningless.
This is telling us that a very good conductor can only talk crap when it comes to really thinking about the subject. For those coming from outside the ‘intellectual’ world, tracts like these are like taking a machine gun to any real intellectual content in the arts and shooting it dead. It's worse than boring it's demoralising, even for those who know a bit about it.
This is a tendency that is alive and flourishing in many disciplines. In academia there are peer reviewed texts and books that actually rely on difficult phrasing (not the same as trying to explain something that actually is difficult) as a cover for having nothing to say and/or not really knowing how to say it. The sum-total of this is destructive and reactionary, the construction of a mind ghetto particularly for those in other disciplines and outside mainstream education.
Nevertheless, Tàr struck a chord with me because the writer/director makes you think of these issues, that there are almost no films that go beyond this - that have intellectual aspects that are sincerely and simply conveyed.
Another recent film about classical music, Maestro, suffered similarly by focussing so much on the private life of Leonard Bernstein at the expense of his muscial ideas and conception. This is strange because Leonard Bernstein went to some lengths to try and explain his music in the vernacular, he gave talks about structure and syntax, and the links to other disciplines such as language. 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. As with Tàr, this was a great missed opportunity to broach barriers; the esoteric ivory tower image of the profession and the cult of personality of the ‘great composer’ and to convey some of the more material and formal elements of the medium.
Both are examples of an overriding
tendency to keep the film-going public away from anything that might be 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.
