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The movieTaropens with an unlikely dramatic gambit: the recitation of a resume.
Lydia Tar, played with bristling confidence by Cate Blanchett, is being introduced at a public conversation.
The audience knows better.
That doesnt exactly make this a feminist epic.
Then he destroys her.
But a woman who occupies a series of the most rarefied podiums borders on science fiction.
For women, a top job at even one of the top orchestras remains a chimera.
Female conductors with great talent and long experience still have to hack through a forest of firsts.
Yet Tars real-world colleagues keep flicking away the gender question much as she does.
(Whatever it might mean to make music in the female way, Tar certainly doesnt.)
Yet precisely because Field weaves such a fastidiously accurate background, the clinkers are loud and seem intentional.
We get a glimpse of Tars capacity for cruelty in a Juilliard master class for student conductors.
She has no patience for the identity the student has assembled out of race, gender, and sexuality.
Her own building materials are music and talent; without them, she ceases to exist.
Field has invented an absurd victim only to feed his egomaniacs need to crush them.
(I also doubt Juilliard is full of cellists who loathe Bach.)
Tar approaches her orchestra with similar hostility.
She treats rehearsals as a forum for the exercise of power.
Conductors charm and wheedle more than they browbeat.
And what is that version, exactly?
Tar claims to see the score as the ultimate love song, but how would she know?
As her wife points out, the only relationship she has that isnt transactional is with her young daughter.
Mahler bared his own impressively extreme emotions in his Fifth Symphony.
The score demands similar expansiveness and generosity from its interpreters.
Tar, though, displays little more than crabbed irritability and self-serving cynicism.
The film uses the mysteries of music to arrive at a set of dull discoveries.
Great art can cloak ordinary nastiness.
Women can pursue and abuse power just as ruthlessly as men.
Artistic projections of love are not the same as the real thing.
