Tar (Movie)

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      One Indelible Scene: the Master Class in Ambiguity in ‘Tár’

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      When Lydia Tár arrives at the Juilliard School to teach a master class in conducting, we know her about as well as the students do. Like them, we are aware — about 20 minutes into the film that bears her name — of her fame and exalted status. They, of course, live in a fictional world in which her celebrity is established, to the extent that their own professional aspirations are shaped by her example. But now they have a chance to encounter her in person. It doesn’t go well.The Juilliard episode is the fourth extended scene in “Tár.” Like the ones that come before, it presents Lydia, a prominent conductor and composer, in a more-or-less public setting. In due time, we’ll peer in on her private life and ponder its relevance to her work and reputation, but for now we know her as a poised paragon of artistic accomplishment. We’ve watched her converse onstage with the writer Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival, flirt with a fan at a reception and spar over lunch with a colleague who is also an important philanthropic patron. In between these lingered-over moments are snippets of cellphone video with anonymous text commentary. The source and meaning of these words and images are unclear, but they produce a tremor of paranoia. We’re not the only ones watching Lydia.Later, a deceptively edited video of the master class will go viral, contributing to the collapse of Lydia’s career as her abusive and dishonest behavior comes to light. The scene itself, among those who have seen “Tár,” has achieved a similar notoriety. It’s become one of the most talked-about parts of the film. The main conflict — an argument between Lydia and an earnest, anxious student named Max, played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist — seems to crystallize the movie’s interest in a familiar kind of clash, one that invites clichés about cancel culture, identity politics and white privilege.But like everything else in “Tár,” this episode of generational and ideological strife is more complicated than it might seem. And also simpler. Lydia, a one-time protégé of Leonard Bernstein, insists on the power of music to produce states of feeling and modes of experience that can’t easily be reduced to anything else. Todd Field, the director of “Tár,” has similar intuitions about film. He and Cate Blanchett, who as Lydia occupies nearly every frame of this 158-minute film, reverse the usual patterns of text and subtext. It’s not that there’s more to “Tár” than meets the eye and ear, with extra meanings hidden beneath the surface. Everything is right there on the screen and the soundtrack, arranged to confound and complicate your expectations.Lydia’s too. She strolls onto the classroom stage as eight young musicians, conducted by Max, are laying down what Lydia will call the “bed of strings” of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ro.” Commanding the students’ attention effortlessly, Lydia is comfortable in her own charisma, confident in her opinions and intellect — to the point of hubris, but we don’t know that yet.The first thing she does is establish her dominance, preparing for Max’s thorough humiliation. He’s nervous, smiling, eager to oblige as she asks him why he chose Juilliard and then suggests that it might have been for the “brand.” Her tone is jocular, but her aggression is unmistakable. She ridicules his choice of music — we’ll come back to that — and pleads with him to consider exploring older, more canonical figures. Like Johann Sebastian Bach, for example.That name turns out to be a provocation. Max, who defines himself as a “BIPOC, pangender person,” says that Bach’s reputation for misogyny and his cisgender white male identity make it hard for him to appreciate the composer’s music. At this moment, the script edges toward an easy satire of the young. There are Gen Xers and baby boomers who have encountered — or at least heard stories about — members of succeeding generations who refuse to read the novels of Edith Wharton, see the films of Woody Allen or worship at the altar of Pablo Picasso. Their critique of the canon is often caricatured and misunderstood, and Max may embody the shibboleths of his elders as much as he does the attitude of his peers. His objection to Bach, in any case, serves as bait for the audience and for Lydia.She seizes on it as a teaching moment, and her response is itself a mini-course in the dos and don’ts of contemporary pedagogy. At times, she is bullying and sarcastic, haranguing the class about the fallacies of identity and failing or refusing to read the sensitivities in the room. But she also tries, in good faith, to reach the students where they are. Rather than revert to an argument from authority, browbeating Max with the eternal fact of Bach’s greatness, she invites him to sit next to her at the piano while she demonstrates the complexity and power of his music. In Bach, she says, the question — illustrated by a rising, unresolved musical phrase that replicates the intonation of an asking voice — is always more interesting than the answer.This is true of art in general. The puzzles, paradoxes and mysteries are what keep it alive. A lot of cultural criticism — by which I mean not only the considered responses of professionals but the immediate reactions of viewers — tacks in the opposite direction. We are eager to find an answer, assign a meaning, take a side. This scene seems to be urging us to do just that, to share Lydia’s irritation with Max, so shallow in his certainty and so ill-equipped to defend his position.We might also, in the moment and especially when we look back on it, squirm at Lydia’s self-satisfaction. She treats the master class as an occasion to perform her own brilliance, a temptation that can be fatal to the actual work of teaching, which finally rests on the canceling of ego. The vanity Lydia displays here, which is undeniably seductive, will contribute to her eventual undoing, and we may feel a premonition of that as we watch her pacing and preening, unaware of the puzzlement and indifference in the eyes of her spectators.Really, though, the scene — like the movie — is much weirder than that. It may seem that Field and Blanchett are collaborating in a topical tale of crime and punishment, which the debate about the relevance of Bach’s behavior to his canonical status recapitulates in miniature. Later, we will find Lydia arguing the other side of the question. At lunch in a Berlin restaurant, she reminds a retired maestro that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once threw a woman down a flight of stairs. Her much older male colleague wonders what that has to do with Schopenhauer’s thought. The argument, as at Juilliard, reaches an impasse.As will any similar argument about Lydia herself, who is a formidably talented artist and also a narcissistic, amoral monster. But neither her greatness nor her awfulness is what is most interesting about her. Shortly after “Tár” opened, The Cut published an amusing, much-mocked article by Brooke LaMantia, who claimed to have watched the movie under the impression that Lydia Tár was a real person. Anthony Lane began his review in The New Yorker with the tongue-in-cheek implication that she just might be. More recently, Dan Kois wrote an essay in Slate suggesting that the last part of the film — the part that chronicles Lydia’s professional and personal undoing — takes place in her head, which is to say in a reality distinct from the literal, social world in which the rest of the movie is set.I don’t really buy that, any more than I believe that anyone really thought there was a real Lydia Tár, but Kois, Lane and LaMantia get at the essential uncanniness of “Tár,” which seems to call into question the nature of reality itself.And that brings us back to the unseen person whose presence is felt in that tense session: Anna Thorvaldsdottir, an actual living Icelandic composer who may have acquired new fame as Lydia Tár’s nemesis. The trashing of Thorvaldsdottir occupies much of the scene. Lydia sneers at her “au courant” trendiness, her “hot” good looks, a score notation that “sounds like René Redzepi’s recipe for reindeer.” A conductor performing her music is like a salesman “selling a car without an engine.” At one point Max meekly notes that Thorvaldsdottir conducted an earlier master class in the same course, and it seems possible that poor Max is an innocent victim in a high-powered music-world beef.Maybe it’s also the case that Lydia is a proxy in a similar war. Maybe Field can’t stand Anna Thorvaldsdottir, or maybe Hildur Gudnadottir, the Icelandic composer who scored “Tar,” feels that way. Iceland is a small country; contemporary classical music is a small world.I won’t speculate further, except to note that Thorvaldsdottir might function as what devotees of a different kind of movie like to call an Easter egg. Adam Gopnik is another, as are Leonard Bernstein and the Juilliard School itself. They appear as tokens, clues, nudges at the viewer who might not be paying the right kind of attention. They all belong to the world outside “Tár” — our world — and their presence inside the movie is more than merely allusive.Lydia Tár exists as if on a folded-over page in that world, where the correct answer to the perennially misunderstood question about the distinction between art and life is written in invisible ink. She’s as real as it gets. More

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      Breaking Out of the #MeToo Movie Formula

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      How “Women Talking” and “Tár” make the discourse around the movement feel thrillingly unfamiliar.When I walked into a screening of “Women Talking,” all I knew about the Sarah Polley film was that it was based on true events — the rapes of more than 100 women and girls in a Bolivian Mennonite community that were revealed in 2009. The premise did not exactly thrill me. I was, frankly, tired of such stories. It felt as if I had spent the last five years watching accounts of sexual violence get spun into tabloid spectacles, stripped for contrarian essay fodder and slowly strangled in the courts. Experiences of harassment and assault had been swallowed by endless debate. This had made me cynical, then bored. I knew what happened when women talked.“Women Talking” is all about debate. The crimes themselves are sketched in exposition; for years, women in the colony had awakened dazed and bloodied in their beds. Their elders dismiss the rapes as the work of devils, or else the “wild female imagination,” until the rapists are caught in the act. When the colony’s men head to town to post their bail, the women assemble in a hayloft to argue their options: They can do nothing; stay and fight; or leave. By film’s end, conversations that had grown so tedious on the internet had been reborn as riveting, hilarious, tragic. I cried through the whole movie, rationing tissues from a little plastic packet until all that was left was the wrapper crinkling in my hands.The movies were once Harvey Weinstein’s domain; now he is their subject. Five years after the story of his abuse broke, a growing genre of movies is pulling character sketches and themes from the #MeToo movement and plugging them into glossy re-enactments (“Bombshell”), workplace dramas (“The Assistant”) and dark comedies (“Promising Young Woman”). Even haunted house movies are now visited by ghosts of toxic masculinity (“Men” and “Barbarian”).A strain of careful literalness pervades many of these works, as if they are nervously eyeing the discourse. This fall’s “She Said” is such a faithful reconstruction of the New York Times investigation of Weinstein, Ashley Judd plays herself. Films that aren’t ripped from the headlines have evinced a staid predictability, as they drive toward studiously correct moral outcomes. But two new films feel truly transformative: In addition to “Women Talking,” a parable about a community of victims who claim their power, there is “Tár,” a portrait of one despotic woman who seizes more and more and more. Both are so wonderfully destabilizing, they manage to scramble our cultural scripts around sexual violence, cancel culture, gender, genius and storytelling itself.What a relief when “Women Talking” drops us into unfamiliar territory. Its colony is a patriarchal religious order that keeps its women illiterate, subjects them to systematic violence and tells them they are imagining things. The women wear weighty floral dresses, sturdy sandals, viciously tight braids. One of them is always sharing wisdom gleaned from her geriatric carriage horses, Ruth and Cheryl. And yet when these women speak, it is as if they are talking about us.Though “Women Talking” is based on a novel that is based on true events, it has a distilled, allegorical quality that frees ideas to circulate in new ways. #MeToo testimonies drew a persistent and cynical retort: What about the men? Here in the hayloft, that becomes a literal and urgent question. If the women stay and fight, they risk losing their families to the colony’s culture of violence. But if they escape, they would have to abandon their brothers, husbands and sons.Much of the hayloft’s conversation concerns men, though they barely appear in the film. It is the survivors who grapple with the moral questions raised by their crisis. Rape is never alienated from the experience of its victims; it need not be carefully phrased for public consumption, and it cannot be flattened into an issue for others to debate. This allows the conversation to grow incautious and complex: Ona (Rooney Mara), pregnant by rape, is coolly philosophical; Mariche (Jessie Buckley) is cynical and resigned; Salome (Claire Foy) is out for blood.Along the way, “Women Talking” makes a case for the intellectual life of the survivor. There is a dark edge to the cultural celebration of women speaking out about their victimization: For decades, centuries, they have been praised for “breaking the silence,” but they have also been entrapped by the expectation that they publicly explain themselves again and again. “Women Talking” sketches an alternate moral universe, one where the spectacle of rape testimony is unnecessary. Here, talk proceeds directly to action.Todd Field’s film “Tár” imagines its own parallel #MeToo universe, one in which the figure of the perpetrator is transferred to a beguiling new host. She is the fictional conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), and she rules atop the rarefied world of classical music. By making his art monster a woman, when her real-life analogues are almost exclusively men, Field makes it impossible to recoil at her in pre-emptive, familiar disgust. He grants us permission to inspect her up close.Tár, we learn as her absurd résumé is unrolled onstage at a lightly satirized version of The New Yorker Festival, is a virtuosic conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, an international celebrity and the author of the forthcoming memoir “Tár on Tár.” She is also an imperious blowhard with undeniable charisma, a self-described “U-Haul lesbian” and a delicious sendup of middlebrow prestige. Onstage, she describes her work in godlike terms. “I start the clock,” Tár says, and with another flick of her baton, “time stops.” But times are changing.When a former acolyte kills herself, Tár’s penchant for seducing her underlings comes back to haunt her. The New York Post shores up anonymous complaints; a crudely edited video of her berating a Juilliard student ricochets across the internet. The online cancellation of an artistic giant can be a tedious subject, but in “Tár,” it acquires sneaky complications. Tár tells a fangirl that a percussive interlude in “The Rite of Spring” makes her feel like “both victim and perpetrator,” and that also describes her social position. Her job is to channel the works of long-dead white men, and she enjoys trying on their privilege, too. After scaling a male-dominated industry, she has created a fellowship for supporting young female conductors — and for grooming assistants and lovers. When Tár ensnares a new protégé, it is as if she is exploiting a younger version of herself.Tár’s real achievement is not conducting but self-mythologizing. The film’s most revelatory scenes show her leveraging her power to lift people or crush them, masterfully coercing artists and philanthropists into submission. But when Tár schools a Juilliard class that a conductor’s job is to “sublimate yourself” into the canon of white male composers, the young musicians do not bend to her will. And when Tár’s power trips can no longer be sublimated into her work, her self-image splinters. The film itself seems to warp under the weight of her anxiety and self-pity. Dark satire sinks into gothic horror. Tár tries to follow a comely cellist into her apartment, but instead encounters a dank basement and a hulking black dog that recalls the maybe-supernatural Hound of the Baskervilles. Later, she finds the strewn pages of her memoir manuscript floating around a former assistant’s empty room, its title transposed to “RAT ON RAT.” This is the stuff of nightmares, where the accused dreams up a version of her comeuppance so overt, it tips into wish fulfillment.The other anagram of “Tár” is, of course, “ART,” and as real-life art monsters disappear from view, “Tár” offers up a work into which we can sublimate our own Schadenfreude and sympathy for abusers. Thanks to Blanchett’s luminous performance and Field’s puzzle-box storytelling, we are freed to obsess. “Tár” has inspired its own bizarro-world discourse, one with pleasingly low stakes, because Lydia Tár is (despite a meme suggestion to the contrary) not a real person. She now circulates as an internet-culture fixation, edited into a fan video set to Taylor Swift’s “Karma” and splashed onto a spoofed cover of Time magazine as a “Problematic Icon.” When the groaning What about the men? question became, instead, What about this one strange woman?, I found that I wanted to discuss little else.If “Women Talking” is about the power of the collective, “Tár” investigates the church of Western individualism, provoking us to confront our tendency to worship at its altar. The most pointed editorializing in “Tár” comes at the very beginning, when the end credits roll and we spend several minutes watching the names of makeup artists and gaffers drift by. Art is not the product of a singular genius, the film seems to say, but a collaborative work of many. Reversing the typical credit sequence signals something else: We are witnessing the end of something — perhaps, an era.“Women Talking” is also concerned with a shifting of power, and it, too, scrambles the typical language of movies to make its point. It opens with a God’s-eye view shot, looking down at Ona stirring helplessly in her bed and screaming for her mother. This is a chilly (and clichéd) perspective on an assault, one that invites a sensation of spectatorship over the victim. The movie ends with another shot from above, but this time it is from the perspective of a mother, presumably Ona, peering down at the newborn baby stirring in her arms. Finally, she has become the omniscient narrator of her new reality.“Women Talking” and “Tár” are two very different films, but they are riffing on the same provocation: God is a woman. More

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      Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences

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      The kind of critically praised dramas that often dominate the awards season are falling flat at the box office, failing to justify the money it takes to make them.A year ago, Hollywood watched in despair as Oscar-oriented films like “Licorice Pizza” and “Nightmare Alley” flatlined at the box office. The day seemed to have finally arrived when prestige films were no longer viable in theaters and streaming had forever altered cinema.But studios held out hope, deciding that November 2022 would give a more accurate reading of the marketplace. By then, the coronavirus would not be such a complicating factor. This fall would be a “last stand,” as some put it, a chance to show that more than superheroes and sequels could succeed.It has been carnage.One after another, films for grown-ups have failed to find an audience big enough to justify their cost. “Armageddon Time” cost roughly $30 million to make and market and collected $1.9 million at the North American box office. “Tár” cost at least $35 million, including marketing; ticket sales total $5.3 million. Universal spent around $55 million to make and market “She Said,” which also took in $5.3 million. “Devotion” cost well over $100 million and has generated $14 million in ticket sales.Even a charmer from the box office king, Steven Spielberg, has gotten off to a humdrum start. “The Fabelmans,” based on Mr. Spielberg’s adolescence, has collected $5.7 million in four weeks of limited play. Its budget was $40 million, not including marketing.What is going on?The problem is not quality: Reviews have been exceptional. Rather, “people have grown comfortable watching these movies at home,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers.“The Fabelmans,” directed by Steven Spielberg, has gotten off to a slow start at the box office.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentEver since Oscar-oriented films began showing up on streaming services in the late 2010s, Hollywood has worried that such movies would someday vanish from multiplexes. The diminishing importance of big screens was accentuated in March, when, for the first time, a streaming film, “CODA” from Apple TV+, won the Academy Award for best picture. ‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.The Song of the Fall?: A 120-year-old symphony by the composer Gustav Mahler is finding new life with unlikely listeners after a star turn in the film.This is about more than money: Hollywood sees the shift as an affront to its identity. Film power players have long clung to the fantasy that the cultural world revolves around them, as if it were 1940. But that delusion is hard to sustain when their lone measuring stick — bodies in seats — reveals that the masses can’t be bothered to come watch the films that they prize most. Hollywood equates this with cultural irrelevancy.Sure, a core crowd of cinephiles is still turning out. “Till,” focused on Mamie Till-Mobley, whose son, Emmett Till, was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, has collected $8.9 million in the United States and Canada. That’s not nothing for an emotionally challenging film. “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a dark comedy with heavily accented dialogue, has also brought in $8 million, with overseas ticket buyers contributing an additional $20 million.“While it is clear the theatrical specialty market hasn’t fully rebounded, we’ve seen ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ continue to perform strongly and drive conversation among moviegoers,” Searchlight Pictures said in a statement. “We firmly believe there’s a place in theaters for films that can offer audiences a broad range of cinematic experiences.”Still, crossover attention is almost always the goal, as underlined by how much film companies are spending on some of these productions. “Till,” for instance, cost at least $33 million to make and market.And remember: Theaters keep roughly half of any ticket revenue.The hope is for results more in line with “The Woman King.” Starring Viola Davis as the leader of an all-female group of African warriors, “The Woman King” collected nearly $70 million at domestic theaters ($92 million worldwide). It cost $50 million to produce and tens of millions more to market.“The Woman King,” starring Viola Davis, is one of the few Oscar-oriented films this year that has struck a box office chord, bringing in about $70 million.Ilze Kitshoff/Sony PicturesOscar-oriented dramas rarely become blockbusters. Even so, these movies used to do quite well at the box office. The World War I film “1917” generated $159 million in North America in 2019 and $385 million worldwide. In 2010, “Black Swan,” starring Natalie Portman as a demented ballerina, collected $107 million ($329 million worldwide).Most studios either declined to comment for this article or provided anodyne statements about being proud of the prestige dramas they have recently released, regardless of ticket sales.The unwillingness to engage publicly on the matter may reflect the annual awards race. Having a contender labeled a box office misfire is not great for vote gathering. (Oscar nominations will be announced on Jan. 24.) Or it may be because, behind the scenes, studios still seem to be grasping for answers.Ask 10 different specialty film executives to explain the box office and you will get 10 different answers. There have been too many dramas in theaters lately, resulting in cannibalization; there have been too few, leaving audiences to look for options on streaming services. Everyone has been busy watching the World Cup on television. No, it’s television dramas like “The Crown” that have undercut these films.Some are still blaming the coronavirus. But that doesn’t hold water. While initially reluctant to return to theaters, older audiences, for the most part, have come to see theaters as a virus-safe activity, according to box office analysts, citing surveys. Nearly 60 percent of “Woman King” ticket buyers were over the age of 35, according to Sony Pictures Entertainment.Hollywood considers anyone over 35 to be “old,” and this is who typically comes to see dramas.Maybe it is more nuanced? Older audiences are back, one longtime studio executive suggested, but sophisticated older audiences are not — in part because some of their favorite art house theaters have closed and they don’t want to mix with the multiplex masses. (He was serious. “Too many people, too likely to encounter a sticky floor.”)Grim dramas have struggled, but sparkly ones have succeeded. “Elvis,” starring Austin Butler, took in $151 million in North America.Warner Bros.Others see a problem with the content. Most of the movies that are struggling at the box office are downbeat, coming at a time when audiences want escape. Consider the successful spring release of the rollicking “Everything, Everywhere All at Once,” which collected $70 million in North America. Baz Luhrmann’s bedazzled “Elvis” delivered $151 million in domestic ticket sales. .“People like to call it ‘escape,’ but that’s not actually what it is,” Jeanine Basinger, the film scholar, said. “It’s entertainment. It can be a serious topic, by the way. But when films are too introspective, as many of these Oscar ones now are, the audience gets forgotten about.“Give us a laugh or two in there! When I think about going out to see misery and degradation and racism and all the other things that are wrong with our lives, I’m too depressed to put on my coat,” continued Ms. Basinger, whose latest book, “Hollywood: The Oral History,” co-written with Sam Wasson, arrived last month.Some studio executives insist that box office totals are an outdated way of assessing whether a film will generate a financial return. Focus Features, for instance, has evolved its business model in the last two years. The company’s films, which include “Tár” and “Armageddon Time,” are now made available for video-on-demand rental — for a premium price — after as little as three weeks in theaters. (Before, theaters got an exclusive window of about 90 days.) The money generated by premium in-home rentals is substantial, Focus has said, although it has declined to provide financial information to support that assertion.Some films, like “Armageddon Time,” now become available for digital rental after they spend just three weeks in theaters.Anne Joyce/Focus FeaturesThe worry in Hollywood is that such efforts will still fall short — that the conglomerates that own specialty film studios will decide there is not enough return on prestige films in theaters to continue releasing them that way. Disney owns Searchlight. Comcast owns Focus. Amazon owns United Artists. The chief executives of these companies like being invited to the Oscars. But they like profit even more.“The good news is we’ve now got a very large streaming business that we can go ahead and redirect that content toward those channels,” Bob Chapek, Disney’s former chief executive, said at a public event on Nov. 8, referring to prestige films. (Robert A. Iger, who has since returned to run Disney, may feel differently.)Others continue to advocate patience. Mr. Gross pointed out that “The Fabelmans” will roll into more theaters over the next month, hoping to capitalize on awards buzz — it is a front-runner for the 2023 best picture Oscar — and the end-of-year holidays. Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” a drug-and-sex induced fever dream about early Hollywood, is scheduled for wide release on Dec. 23.“I think movies are going to come back,” Mr. Spielberg recently told The New York Times. “I really do.”Steven Spielberg, on the set of his production “The Fabelmans.” Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment More

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      Mahler’s Having a Moment. He’s Got Lydia Tár to Thank for It.

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      The Austrian composer’s Symphony No. 5 is the obsession of the conductor played by Cate Blanchett — and of the fans of her latest film.For a 70-minute Austrian symphony first performed more than a century ago, Mahler’s Fifth makes a surprisingly strong case for itself as the song of the season.No, Gustav Mahler didn’t occupy the top 10 spots in the Billboard Hot 100, as Taylor Swift did last week, and the piece’s lush fourth movement has yet to be co-opted by the TikTok crowd. But the symphony, which plays a central role in the new Cate Blanchett drama, “Tár,” seems to have a way of sticking with audiences long after they’ve left the theater, finding its way onto the strolling, cleaning and cooking playlists of listeners who might otherwise be more inclined toward Adele, OneRepublic or Beyoncé.Enjoying a brisk autumn day walking around Manhattan listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. I’ve been TÁR-pilled.— jeff becomes her 🔮 (@jheimbrock) October 19, 2022
      Dalton Glass, a tech worker in Lakeland, Fla., is not a total stranger to classical music: He listened to a lot of it as a child, and as an adult, he hears at least a bit whenever he has an incoming call. (His ringtone of several years is a snatch of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”) Still, he has some blind spots.“I’d never heard Mahler before in my life until that movie,” said Mr. Glass, 30. Now, he said, the piece is in regular rotation.Cate Blanchett as the fictional conductor Lydia Tár on the cover of a new soundtrack album.Deutsche GrammophonThe model for the “Tár” soundtrack cover is a 1993 release featuring Claudio Abbado.Deutsche GrammophonMr. Glass’s fascination with the film — he and a friend talked about it for the entire hourlong drive home from Tampa, where he caught the first of the two screenings he has seen to date — echoes the fixation of the imperious heroine brought to life by Ms. Blanchett.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Learning to Act: Sophie Kauer, a cellist in real life and in the film, had zero acting experience when she auditioned. She learned the craft from Blanchett, and from Michael Caine videos.In “Tár,” Mahler’s Fifth is something of a white whale for the celebrated (fictional) maestro Lydia Tár, the only Mahler symphony she has yet to record with a major orchestra in order to complete what audiences are told is a kind of Grand Slam of conducting. Throughout the film’s two and a half hours, she pursues the live recording with single-minded intensity, even as her professional and personal lives begin to unravel amid the fallout from her abuses of the power of the podium.Gage Tarlton, a 24-year-old playwright who lives in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, saw the movie in large part because he is a huge fan of Cate Blanchett. “I’ve loved Cate Blanchett for a really long time,” he said. “If Cate Blanchett is in a movie, I’m going to see it.”Although many of Mr. Tarlton’s feelings about the film are proving to be a slow burn — he said he “docked half a star” from his initial appraisal of the movie on Letterboxd after taking some time to puzzle out the story’s lingering questions and ambiguities — he didn’t waste any time adding some Mahler to his life.“I looked it up as soon as I got home,” he said.Others seem to have had the same idea. In October, streams of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 on Apple Music were up 150 percent from the previous month, according to data provided by the platform. Compared with the same month last year, they had more than tripled.Of the many recordings of the symphony available for streaming, Mr. Tarlton’s go-to is a 1993 Deutsche Grammophon album featuring the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Claudio Abbado. In the movie, Ms. Blanchett’s Tár uses that album’s cover image, a photograph of Abbado marking up a score while seated in a concert hall, as a model for her own Deutsche Grammophon photo shoot.“I actually tried a couple different ones, and that is the one that I like the most,” Mr. Tarlton said.A deliciously — or perhaps deliriously — meta concept album issued by Deutsche Grammophon shows Ms. Blanchett in a similar pose. It features audio excerpts from the film, original compositions by the Oscar-winning composer Hildur Gudnadottir and Ms. Blanchett plunking out “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”So when the soundtrack slipped the notice of even some dedicated fans of the movie, it was very possibly a function of timing: It came out on Oct. 21, the very same day as a certain blockbuster album whose first-week sales obliterated expectations of what was possible in the streaming era.The entry of Mahler’s Fifth into pop culture echoes the resurgences of works by Beethoven and Pachelbel in the 1970s and 1980s.Photo illustration by Kyle Berger for The New York Times“I listened to Taylor’s album probably at 5 a.m. the day after it came out,” said Millie Sloan, 47, referring to Ms. Swift’s album “Midnights.” Ms. Sloan, an account manager at her family’s construction company in Atlanta, said she was not aware of the “Tár” tie-in album. She said on Twitter that she had been listening exclusively to Mahler and “Midnights” for a week — though not on the same playlist. (“It’s a different listen,” she explained.)Ms. Sloan maintains a playlist of instrumental music that she encounters in the wild on TV and in movies, so the symphony had an obvious home in her Spotify account. What was less clear was where it would fit into her life.“I did put it on while I was cooking dinner the other day,” she said. But after gamely trying to soldier through the meal, she and her husband ultimately found the piece “a little too exuberant for a dinnertime listen.” She now listens to it mostly while walking and doing chores.The symphony (full title: Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor) is regarded as one of Mahler’s greatest achievements. First performed in Cologne, Germany, in October 1904, the piece was once described by a New York Times critic as “the first of Mahler’s orchestral works in which the ensemble seems to embody a single mind: a churning, reflective and obsessive being. It is, to be sure, a neurotic mind, full of mercurial and unpredictable reactions.”It is far from the first classical composition to enjoy a moment of sudden pop cultural relevance. Particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, plum placements in popular films thrust masterworks into the mainstream. Among those to get a boost from Hollywood: Pachelbel’s Canon (“Ordinary People”), Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (“Apocalypse Now”) and Beethoven’s Fifth, a cheekily reconfigured version of which — “A Fifth of Beethoven,” anyone? — figured in the disco-era bible that is the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.Mahler’s Fifth does seem to have achieved an unusual distinction: featuring prominently in two New York Film Festival darlings that opened in American movie theaters last month. In addition to its star turn in “Tár,” there is “Decision to Leave,” a fast-paced detective thriller by the South Korean director Park Chan-wook that makes defiant use of the symphony’s fourth movement. More

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      Cate Blanchett’s ‘Tár’ Puts Mahler in the Spotlight

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      The Austrian composer’s Symphony No. 5 is the obsession of the conductor played by Cate Blanchett — and of the fans of her latest film.For a 70-minute Austrian symphony first performed more than a century ago, Mahler’s Fifth makes a surprisingly strong case for itself as the song of the season.No, Gustav Mahler didn’t occupy the top 10 spots in the Billboard Hot 100, as Taylor Swift did last week, and the piece’s lush fourth movement has yet to be co-opted by the TikTok crowd. But the symphony, which plays a central role in the new Cate Blanchett drama, “Tár,” seems to have a way of sticking with audiences long after they’ve left the theater, finding its way onto the strolling, cleaning and cooking playlists of listeners who might otherwise be more inclined toward Adele, OneRepublic or Beyoncé.Enjoying a brisk autumn day walking around Manhattan listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. I’ve been TÁR-pilled.— jeff becomes her 🔮 (@jheimbrock) October 19, 2022
      Dalton Glass, a tech worker in Lakeland, Fla., is not a total stranger to classical music: He listened to a lot of it as a child, and as an adult, he hears at least a bit whenever he has an incoming call. (His ringtone of several years is a snatch of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”) Still, he has some blind spots.“I’d never heard Mahler before in my life until that movie,” said Mr. Glass, 30. Now, he said, the piece is in regular rotation.Cate Blanchett as the fictional conductor Lydia Tár on the cover of a new soundtrack album.Deutsche GrammophonThe model for the “Tár” soundtrack cover is a 1993 release featuring Claudio Abbado.Deutsche GrammophonMr. Glass’s fascination with the film — he and a friend talked about it for the entire hourlong drive home from Tampa, where he caught the first of the two screenings he has seen to date — echoes the fixation of the imperious heroine brought to life by Ms. Blanchett.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Learning to Act: Sophie Kauer, a cellist in real life and in the film, had zero acting experience when she auditioned. She learned the craft from Blanchett, and from Michael Caine videos.In “Tár,” Mahler’s Fifth is something of a white whale for the celebrated (fictional) maestro Lydia Tár, the only Mahler symphony she has yet to record with a major orchestra in order to complete what audiences are told is a kind of Grand Slam of conducting. Throughout the film’s two and a half hours, she pursues the live recording with single-minded intensity, even as her professional and personal lives begin to unravel amid the fallout from her abuses of the power of the podium.Gage Tarlton, a 24-year-old playwright who lives in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, saw the movie in large part because he is a huge fan of Cate Blanchett. “I’ve loved Cate Blanchett for a really long time,” he said. “If Cate Blanchett is in a movie, I’m going to see it.”Although many of Mr. Tarlton’s feelings about the film are proving to be a slow burn — he said he “docked half a star” from his initial appraisal of the movie on Letterboxd after taking some time to puzzle out the story’s lingering questions and ambiguities — he didn’t waste any time adding some Mahler to his life.“I looked it up as soon as I got home,” he said.Others seem to have had the same idea. In October, streams of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 on Apple Music were up 150 percent from the previous month, according to data provided by the platform. Compared with the same month last year, they had more than tripled.Of the many recordings of the symphony available for streaming, Mr. Tarlton’s go-to is a 1993 Deutsche Grammophon album featuring the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Claudio Abbado. In the movie, Ms. Blanchett’s Tár uses that album’s cover image, a photograph of Abbado marking up a score while seated in a concert hall, as a model for her own Deutsche Grammophon photo shoot.“I actually tried a couple different ones, and that is the one that I like the most,” Mr. Tarlton said.A deliciously — or perhaps deliriously — meta concept album issued by Deutsche Grammophon shows Ms. Blanchett in a similar pose. It features audio excerpts from the film, original compositions by the Oscar-winning composer Hildur Gudnadottir and Ms. Blanchett plunking out “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”So when the soundtrack slipped the notice of even some dedicated fans of the movie, it was very possibly a function of timing: It came out on Oct. 21, the very same day as a certain blockbuster album whose first-week sales obliterated expectations of what was possible in the streaming era.The entry of Mahler’s Fifth into pop culture echoes the resurgences of works by Beethoven and Pachelbel in the 1970s and 1980s.Photo illustration by Kyle Berger for The New York Times“I listened to Taylor’s album probably at 5 a.m. the day after it came out,” said Millie Sloan, 47, referring to Ms. Swift’s album “Midnights.” Ms. Sloan, an account manager at her family’s construction company in Atlanta, said she was not aware of the “Tár” tie-in album. She said on Twitter that she had been listening exclusively to Mahler and “Midnights” for a week — though not on the same playlist. (“It’s a different listen,” she explained.)Ms. Sloan maintains a playlist of instrumental music that she encounters in the wild on TV and in movies, so the symphony had an obvious home in her Spotify account. What was less clear was where it would fit into her life.“I did put it on while I was cooking dinner the other day,” she said. But after gamely trying to soldier through the meal, she and her husband ultimately found the piece “a little too exuberant for a dinnertime listen.” She now listens to it mostly while walking and doing chores.The symphony (full title: Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor) is regarded as one of Mahler’s greatest achievements. First performed in Cologne, Germany, in October 1904, the piece was once described by a New York Times critic as “the first of Mahler’s orchestral works in which the ensemble seems to embody a single mind: a churning, reflective and obsessive being. It is, to be sure, a neurotic mind, full of mercurial and unpredictable reactions.”It is far from the first classical composition to enjoy a moment of sudden pop cultural relevance. Particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, plum placements in popular films thrust masterworks into the mainstream. Among those to get a boost from Hollywood: Pachelbel’s Canon (“Ordinary People”), Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (“Apocalypse Now”) and Beethoven’s Fifth, a cheekily reconfigured version of which — “A Fifth of Beethoven,” anyone? — figured in the disco-era bible that is the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.Mahler’s Fifth does seem to have achieved an unusual distinction: featuring prominently in two New York Film Festival darlings that opened in American movie theaters last month. In addition to its star turn in “Tár,” there is “Decision to Leave,” a fast-paced detective thriller by the South Korean director Park Chan-wook that makes defiant use of the symphony’s fourth movement. More

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      She Knew the Cello. The Acting She Learned With Cate Blanchett.

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      Sophie Kauer was a cellist studying for a degree when a friend urged her to audition for “Tár.” She watched Michael Caine videos on acting and dove right in.Lydia Tár commands with the gravitational pull of a planet: Everyone and everything, including the camera in “Tár,” Todd Field’s epic about a fictional maestro, lives in her shadow. But when Lydia (Cate Blanchett), who has been accused of sexual harassment, sets her sights on Olga, a rising Russian cellist, she is confronted with a foil of sorts. Is the young woman disarmingly naïve or particularly cunning?In reality, Sophie Kauer, who plays Olga, is a British-German cellist who, after responding to a vague open casting call practically on a lark, found herself months later plunked down in front of Blanchett shooting two-hander scenes in Berlin. She was 19 and had never acted in her life.“Sometimes I feel like everything’s happening backwards,” Kauer, now 21, said recently on a video call from a professor’s classroom at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she is studying for a classical music performance degree. “I’ve kind of just been dropped into the thick of it, which is both wonderful and so weird at the same time.”Kauer appeared grateful, dazed and remarkably well-adjusted about the film and the attention. She has been meticulous about scheduling classes around press duties to maintain her school’s mandatory 80 percent attendance rate.Born in London, she picked up the cello at 8 and has always been naturally driven — she speaks five languages, and for early auditions developed her Russian accent through YouTube videos. (After she was cast, two dialect coaches took over.)“If I want to do something, then I’ll just do it,” Kauer said, not with arrogance but rather the air of someone who is self-assured about her passions. Music, she emailed after we spoke, “has been my absolute rock through everything. But what I really don’t like is being put in a box and told that classical music is all I am allowed to do or I am not sufficiently serious about my career.”Kauer spoke about the casting process, working with Blanchett, and what she thinks about that Juilliard scene. These are edited excerpts from our interview.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.What has your life been like these past few weeks?I’m still getting the hang of all of this. Every interview I do is completely different and I learn so much from it. I just think it’s so surreal that someone wants to talk to me. [Laughs]How did you become involved in the film?My friend sends me a casting call that has been posted in our school Facebook group, saying, “Look, they’re looking for a young cellist who could do a Russian accent and feels comfortable in front of a camera. I think you should apply for this.” And I was like, “Oh, but I don’t do any acting. I wouldn’t get it.” And she was like, “Oh, just apply. It’ll be fun.”I wasn’t really thinking about what size the role was. I had a Zoom audition with [Field] and I was like, “This is so cool. I’m going to tell my grandkids that I did a Zoom audition with Todd Field.” Then I got a call asking if I could send a recording of the piece you hear Olga playing in the film, the Elgar Cello Concerto. I had played it before, but I had to get it back in my fingers in like a day and send it straight away. They were really cryptic the week after. It wasn’t until I actually was put on a Zoom call with Avy Kaufman [a casting director] and Todd that I found out I had got the part. No one had actually explained it to me.Kauer in the film. It’s not clear whether her character is naïve or cunning. “That’s the thing — you are not meant to know,” she said.Focus FeaturesDid you have any acting experience?When the occasional Shakespeare compulsory play came around [in school], I’d play the noble man in the background with the painted-on beard who says “Aye” three times or something like that. [Laughs] That was the extent of it.Michael Caine did these lessons on film acting [available on YouTube]. That was very technical, but I picked up a lot. I kind of figured it out as I went along. When I would have days or hours off, I asked Todd if I would be allowed to watch everyone else act their scenes. I was trying to pick up everything that they were doing,What was it like to go from no acting experience to suddenly working opposite Cate Blanchett?I remember I saw her for the first time she put out her hand and she said, “Hi, I’m Cate.” And you’re just like, “I know!” [Laughs] And then I had to [rehearse with] her after having met her five minutes before.I quickly learned that she’s one of the world’s loveliest people, and she’s so supportive and generous. I would even go as far to say that I learned to act from her and Todd.Olga has a very specific dynamic with Lydia. She seems to be the only one Lydia can’t fully control. Why is that?That’s the thing — you are not meant to know. We have no idea if Olga was just super naïve and very caught up with her life going exactly to plan and her achieving her wildest dreams. Or if she’s super calculating and knows exactly what she’s doing. Part of me would like to think that she’s smart, and the other part of me wants to think that she’s careless and young and kind of free. None of us actually really know the entirety of our characters. I don’t think Todd does either. What do you make of how the film examines notions of power in the world of classical music?The release of this film is very timely because the Independent Society of Musicians just released a study saying that sexual harassment, bullying and racism is at its all-time worst in the classical music industry, and that people feel like they can’t speak out about it because they’re freelancers. And when they do speak out, they face repercussions and are not rebooked.It’s perfect that this film is coming out now. I also think the fact that it’s a woman in a position that a man would stereotypically be in is really good, and in a way is slightly less offensive. People kind of just see the problem for what it is, rather than getting offended.The film has been discussed at length within the framework of the culture wars, in particular with the scene at Juilliard when a student expresses discomfort playing music written by straight white men. Lydia has no patience for him. As someone in these classrooms, do you have sympathies for either side in that Juilliard scene?Of course I do. We need to be open to discussing it and including all these new voices that have been unheard for so long — music by women or including more cultures and ethnicities. And we can’t just forget what has gone before because this is what our whole history is based on. I can’t wake up tomorrow and say, sorry, I’m never going to play a piece written by a white male composer again. Because unfortunately that is just how history is, and that is the vast majority of our music.You can’t exclude the majority of music history because you don’t identify with it. But I also do think that the point he makes is very relevant. There is very little representation for a lot of genders and ethnicities and cultures, and classical music may have been a bit slower to evolve. But it is evolving. Every time I watch, my sympathy for each character changes. Sometimes I think Lydia is totally right, and other times I’m like, no, Max, he’s the one who’s totally right.What’s next for you?I am still in the middle of studying for my music degree, so I have a lot of stuff to catch up on. I’m looking forward to being a musician again. But I did enjoy the acting a lot. I’m still very young, so I’m kind of seeing what happens and taking it one thing at a time. I would like to hope that this isn’t my last project. It was really quite something. More

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      In ‘Tár,’ a Female Maestro Falls Into the Same Old Traps

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      The film’s thesis is blunt: Put a woman in power, and she’ll be as sexually inappropriate and badly behaved as any man.Early in the new film “Tár,” an eminent conductor, played by Cate Blanchett, has strewn classical LPs over her floor. They’re designed in the old-school style of the Deutsche Grammophon label, which had the grandest maestros of the 20th century — the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado — brooding from the covers of recordings of symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner.Lydia Tár is sorting through them with her foot — as if in disgust, like she can’t bear to touch them. As if she’s toppled the whole patriarchal tradition and can now stand above it, a David who’s killed all the Goliaths.But we soon discover that she wasn’t mulling over the records in that spirit; she was merely looking for inspiration. For her new Mahler album, she’s decided that she wants to be photographed sitting alone — oversize score open, face solemn, lighting dramatic — in the seats of the Berlin Philharmonic’s home hall. Just like Abbado and the rest.Tár represents a radically different face of classical music. Barely any women — in the film or in real life — have done what she has: made it to the top tier of the world’s orchestral podiums. Let alone that of the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps the most celebrated of them all, which Blanchett’s character rules with cool authority.“We don’t see women at the top of this food chain ever,” said Marin Alsop, who during her tenure at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was the first and only female leader of one of the 25 largest American ensembles.But, as we gradually learn, Tár represents anything but a radical break with the past.In the music world, that past is embodied in the worship of maestros, whose hard-to-define, near-spiritual, silent yet crucial role as conduits of the great composers has long granted them fearsome dominance. Theirs is a position so flush with power that it has been all too easy for them to abuse it.Blanchett plays a powerful conductor in “Tár,” which posits that classical music is addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader.Focus FeaturesIt’s become an assumption for many inside and outside the field that, as women and people of color slowly but steadily diversify the ranks of top conductors, the problems associated with maestro worship — that outsize power, eye-popping (even deficit-encouraging) salaries, sexual misconduct, anger issues, reactionary repertory choices, dependence on name-brand conductors to sell tickets — will ease.Not so fast, says “Tár,” written and directed by Todd Field.The film posits a more unsettling, intractable possibility: that classical music remains so robustly addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader that it will continue to grant those leaders a degree of power that will inevitably corrupt women and men alike.For Lydia Tár is no better — certainly no better behaved — than any of the rageaholic, underling-seducing men we are often assured are going extinct.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.That some of those men have, in recent years, undergone steep falls from grace for their misconduct doesn’t seem to give Tár pause. She is a sexual predator, imperious, controlling. She grants plum gigs to her crushes and turns up her nose at fresh sounds as she elevates the standards: The movie centers on her rehearsing the Berlin orchestra in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which she decides to pair with Elgar’s equally classic Cello Concerto (featuring, of course, a talented young woman who has caught her eye as soloist).“Tár” says that the fundamental structure of the field — the persistent over-glorification of the podium, casting even benign conductors in a paternal role — is the problem. And it’s a problem that won’t necessarily be solved by changing the identity of the person holding the baton. The film’s thesis could be bluntly stated: Women, too, can be inappropriately horny and generally evil.The woman Field creates has achieved more power than any female conductor in history. She wields it malignantly, and she is humiliated for doing so, even more catastrophically than any of her real-life male counterparts.If that fantasy is persuasive, it’s because, for all its noirish, even horror-movie trappings, “Tár” is a largely realistic depiction of its subject matter. (Far more so than “Black Swan” in relation to ballet, or “Whiplash” to jazz.) Blanchett gestures on the podium like a real conductor; a few references to the symphony she is preparing as “the Five” — rather than “the Fifth” or “Mahler Five” — are almost the only slips of tone.Marin Alsop, here conducting the Baltimore Symphony in 2015, was the only female conductor of a top American orchestra, when she stepped down last year. (Now, a year later, there is again one.)Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe protagonist is clearly based partly on Alsop, who stepped down from the Baltimore podium last year — leaving the number of women in top American positions at zero until Nathalie Stutzmann became music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this month.Alsop, like Tár, is a lesbian with a partner and a child. And like Tár, she founded a fellowship program for young women seeking to follow in her footsteps. Unlike Tár, Alsop has never been accused of misconduct, with the fellows or otherwise.When we spoke by phone recently, Alsop said that the premise that women would fall into the traps laid by traditional power structures was “premature.”“There haven’t been any women in those positions,” she added. “There haven’t been any people of color in those positions. To assume that they will also be taken under the spell of this maestro mythology, it really is presumptuous.”Presumptuous or not, the film is a reminder that the change we should hope and work for is as much about modesty as it is about identity: a vision of conducting as a vehicle for building community, for giving back, rather than solely for wielding authority in the service of a tiny group of pieces from the ever more distant past. (It is not only men who perpetuate this limited view of the repertory: Stutzmann, for one, told The New York Times recently that she would proudly be focusing on music from before the 20th century.)Cultural changes may well force modesty on the field, like it or not. In the wake of pandemic lockdowns, and as classical music continues to drift further from the mainstream, ticket sales that were once energized by the names and faces of beloved maestros have dried up. Audiences haven’t heard of almost any conductors. Deutsche Grammophon and the other record labels that hawked those brooding visions of paternal authority are shadows of what they were just a few decades ago.Conductors will always be responsible for wrangling a single vision from a stage of 100 musicians; for making decisions; for leading. But that leadership can be more demystified, more collaborative, more modest. It’s a change that must involve more diversity on the podium — but, as “Tár” cautions us, not just that.“I hope the premise that women or people of color will be just as autocratic can be disproved,” Alsop said. “I hope we’re given the opportunity to disprove it.” More