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Tár
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An
intriguing wrinkle entered the universe of image and sound between the notable
cultural events of Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) and the TV series Gossip
Girl (2007-2012, sequel 2021).
In
both, the use of homely media devices – video camera and videocassettes, mobile
phone transmissions – opens up a hole in the narrative order that is
deliberately left gaping for an inordinately long time, even past the
conclusion of the fiction. The game ends up gesturing toward a vanishing point
of impossibility: where can the camera (which catches such intimate and
momentous scenes) be situated in Caché, and who is wielding the
ubiquitous phone that sees, hears and records absolutely everything in Gossip
Girl? (I checked out of that series long before the answer was apparently
revealed in the final episode – so don’t tell me about it; personally, it
remains a lovely enigma.)
It's
not new in itself to hinge a story upon the mystery of an anonymous sender’s
identity – A Letter to Three Wives was already parlaying that trick in
1949 – but leaving these constitutive holes, mysteries and paradoxes entirely unsutured is quite another matter. In Haneke’s case (if not in that of Gossip Girl),
the intention was to leach out a type of Lacanian thriller, with its variously
incommensurable and incompossible elements and layers exposed. For TV
showrunners Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the aim was doubtless simpler
and more mercenary: how far, through how many seasons, could a cliffhanger
premise be stretched and suspended? But we should never deny to even the
slickest, most superficial pop culture the potentiality to tickle, haunt and
surprise us. Certified Art has no territorial hold on that.
This
(for want of better words) high/low context is relevant to Todd Field’s Tár,
because it’s a film of two faces, turned to broadly different orientations.
It’s at once a Hollywood movie and a European art film – which is reflected, in
the first place, at the level of its production, financing, locations and
languages.
Tár is
unquestionably closer, in its aims and effects, to Haneke than to serial TV
(Haneke’s regular editor, Monika Willi, is a principal collaborator here) – in
fact, much closer than many accounts have given it credit for. Look at how it
begins, shot 1: a mobile phone that frames Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) on a
plane, while the real body is slumped, out of focus, behind it. And, on top of
this humble broadcast, a back-and-forth, real-time messaging about “our girl”
that somebody “still loves”. In this movie where image-making and social media
are ubiquitous, the mystery as to who constitutes, at any point, the
text-dialoguing pair – at best, we can know or surmise only one member of the
chat – triggers a veritable, gnawing contagion of speculation and possibility. But
Field, like Haneke, is not in the business of tying up plots or providing neat,
resolving answers.
Reviewers
tend to see (if we’re lucky) the unbroken, 10-minute Steadicam take on Lydia
grandstanding as she prowls through her memorably vicious Masterclass. They see
a big bunch of front-loaded credits (underneath a more elusive sound-grab collage
worthy of Leos Carax at his most cryptic). What they don’t see or hear or note:
the recurring temps morts; the consistently bold use of long shots (the
camera glued to a spot at the back of rooms while every in-scene cue is
screaming for a conventional cut-in); the sparse sound design. (For me,
style-wise, Tár is way ahead of Field’s previous work, such as In the Bedroom [2001].)
Nor
do the rampant reviewers take much notice of elements that appear to borrow
from Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Tsai Ming-liang even more from Haneke: exotic-native
dream inserts (a reference to Lydia’s youthful thesis work on indigenous music
culture); maddening, recurring sounds that can rarely be rationally explained
(a tie to the overrated Memoria [2021]) and may involve ghosts;
initially real landscapes that gradually become porous spaces of psychic
projection (the vomit-inducing spectacle of serial masseurs–in-waiting –
seemingly all current film and TV is obsessed with strenuous vomiting; the
squat-like labyrinth into which Lydia pursues Olga [Sophie Kauer], reminiscent
of most of Pedro Costa’s Horse Money [2015]). Tár is not a realistic piece, and
those who nitpick about the veracity of this-or-that musicological detail (“she
wouldn’t say that”) are wasting our time.
Above
all, most commentators don’t take account of the ellipses. Although it
has a clearer line (a sequence of days and events leading up to a big Mahler
concert) than, for instance, Jerzy Skolimowski’s fabulous Eo (2022),
it’s almost as fragmented. Tár has a fascinating pattern of the
off-screen, the unseen, the in-between. It moves everything in the story into
the register of the conditional, the provisional, the speculative. Mighty
strange things flit in and out: the back of a head in an auditorium; the black
boots glimpsed on a staircase or in a toilet cubicle; a disappearing annotated
performance score; the obsessive graphic figure inscribed inside an old book
(Vita Sackville-West’s 1923 Challenge) and a child’s play area.
We
come to know very little, concretely, about any of the people shown, or what
they have done in the lifetimes in which we’ll never see them. This goes as
much for Lydia’s supposed/presumed indiscretions (yes, she certainly made it near-impossible
for the unfortunate Krista [Sylvia Flote] to get a job – but reviewers fail to
mention how we also observe the agony of Lydia falling in love with an
indifferent, younger object of desire) as for the exact plan of the plot to
bring her down (the viral video, for instance, is clearly a collective work of
many hands!). And as much for the coupledom of Lydia and Sharon (Nina Hoss) as
for the motivations of any of the ambitious protégés (beginning with Noémie
Merlant as Francesca) who surround the star conductor.
This
systematic structure of ellipsis is, naturally, also what then allows
commentators to project like crazy into what the movie is or is not saying, is
or is not supporting/endorsing. There’s something a bit too calculated and
opportunistic in Field’s invitation to wildly interpret from every possible
position – a sticky mirror-image of the social-media free-for-all (“metrical logic” as Jordan Chrietzberg calls it) that
Field is trying (Haneke-style), on another level, to put at a critical
distance. Some swarming confusion, deliberate or not, of thematic “intent” (the
word is spoken often in the film). But, all the same, you have to credit the
guy for daring to go this far in what is, on one of its Janus faces, a
Hollywood “event” movie.
I’ve
seen Tár twice now. The first time it held my interest all the way
through; the second, it impressed me more deeply. Initially, I was captivated
by all the detail that makes it somewhat of a sequel (in spirit) to Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001):
the exacting rituals and power-games of a severely hierarchised high-culture
world of classical music; the Kubrick-like, inexorable progression of moves
that lead to a catastrophic crashing out of this milieu. Savage perversity
under the façade of elite sophistication (the Barry Lyndon [1975] touch).
A tale of entropy (the decrepit old neighbours), rather than tragedy; of
systems that run down, splutter out and die, taking all implicated human
subjects with them. Lydia increasingly banged-up (her almost comical off-screen
fall) and maimed, like a Cassavetes hero. Lydia venting at top volume alongside
the wheeze of her accordion. Lydia finally herself dressing up in the toilet
cubicle (full metal jacket) in order to explode in violence in public – a
satisfyingly crazed and cathartic moment of melodrama.
But
there’s a significant difference, in one respect, between Tár and The
Piano Teacher: where Haneke, via Elfriede Jelinek, dared suggest that the
music of Schubert or Bach triggers a pitiless process of “abasement” that is
inherent to its art, Field upholds a more conventional separation between the
oceanic affect of a Mahler symphony and the dirty world of institutions,
celebrity mania and politics built around it. Yet this separation also has the
knock-on effect of implying that all such grand music is, in the final
instance, almost an indifferent part of this social machine, simply its pretext;
the same war for fame and glory would still go on regardless, without the music
ostensibly on show as what all its practitioners “serve” (another keyword).
It’s telling that, apart from Lydia abortively trying to pick out a basic
melody with one finger on a piano, the film refuses to mock-up any actual
musical “award winning” composition by her – this is part of its strategic
ellipsis-system. Artistic/creative expression is neither here nor there.
The
better opinion-pieces on Tár have duly pointed to the old structures
underlying its drama – the tragedy of a Great Figure’s hubris and whatnot, AKA Citizen Kane (1941)
stuff – and identified the newer tangle of myths (Lydia as both human Hunter
and animal Hunted, not to mention Haunted) coalescing in the time of Me Too
(just as also happened in Carax’s Annette [2021]). (I particularly
recommend, along this line, Megan Feeney’s review and interview with Field in
the March 2023 Cineaste.) We live in a strange, still-unfolding moment of
the Western world when the call for Complex Characters (such as a woman in the
difficult and contradictory position of wielding patriarchal and institutional
power) clashes head-on with the cry that Representation Matters (must a woman
conductor – a “U-haul lesbian”, at that – be the villain, and must she be
ultimately banished to an unnamed Asian bolthole?).
In
this context, Field, it seems to me, aims for the Scorsese Trajectory, which is
itself an update on the Welles template: the celebrities of our world (boxers,
gangsters, cowboy capitalists … ), who came up from nothing to eventually live
in a bubble of wealth, privilege and non-stop fantasy-projection, must
eventually come crashing down to agonisingly ordinary, unglamorous banality.
And just as Leo DiCaprio as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) ended up
pitching his motivational seminar to a slack-jawed audience of New Zealanders,
Lydia will go to ground conducting video-game symphonies for a passively rapt
audience of cosplayers. It’s not a Fall from Grace, and it’s not even the end
of the road for Ms. Tár: like those tough crocodiles hanging around in the
water since the shoot of Apocalypse Now (1979/2001), she’ll likely live on, to resurrect
another day … On this level, Tár enters into an arresting correspondence
with the recent work by another Austrian filmmaker (and another collaborator
with Willi) who Field namechecks in interviews: Ulrich Seidl and his
double-punch of Rimini and Sparta (both 2022, re-edited together in 2023 as Wicked Games).
The
performance of Blanchett: we will be reading until the End of the Anthropocene
the clichéd journalistic complaint that we can ‘see her acting’. Hey, some news
for you: plenty of actors, across many traditions, let you see them acting. Joaquin
Phoenix, Isabelle Huppert, Al Pacino, Tilda Swinton, Humphrey Bogart, Elaine
May, Jean-Pierre Léaud. Because, in some cases, they’re stars with familiar
mannerisms; and, in other cases, because they adopt a willfully histrionic method, within a cinematic style that showcases it. Anyhow, when do we ever not see acting? It’s there on the screen to view and observe, like every other
kind of creative labour. Enough, already, of this nonsense of the spectral
disappearance of the actor/pure spectatorial immersion in the character. Put an
end to invisibility of the medium; it doesn’t exist.
In Tár there’s a fine meshing of Blanchett’s Australian acting and the
Austrian Janus face of its film form. The inaugural shot of Lydia awake and on
her toes – waiting backstage to go on for her interview with the New Yorker fellow – runs through a wide range of the character’s physical tics, voluntary
and involuntary: concentration, shudder, twitch, blink, short breath, brushing
of shoulders. The image-preparation business infiltrates every muscle of her
body underneath the clothes, make-up and accessories. All this will return many
times, in many variations, in the most diverse of situations, especially those
involving solitude: practising at the piano, waking up from nightmares,
following pesky sounds around the house, stalking the underground with a Teddy
bear in hand.
At
this level of internal electrical connection, Tár is more like Abel
Ferrara’s King of New York (1990) than anything else – and, coming from me,
that’s a big compliment.
© Adrian Martin 14 & 15 March 2023 |
