Tár and Lesbian Ra(n)ge
Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár in Tár (2022)
This is her score.
When Cate Blanchett starred in the cozy sapphic romance Carol in 2015, queer audiences were quick to give her flowers for her portrayal of a lesbian navigating love and its limits in the 1950s. So, while Carol is the comforting lesbian film we watch to feel warm, 2022’s Tár is the frigid, unsettling, lesbian downfall film we can’t look away from.
Todd Field’s Tár is a psychological drama following Cate Blanchett as the fictional Lydia Tár — the greatest modern-day composer-conductor alive — in her gradual fall from grace. The film introduces Lydia in a prestigious interview as a meticulously intelligent woman, an EGOT winner, a wife, and a mother (in that order). Tár is quietly focused in every scene not filled with music, but jolts to life when Lydia becomes the target of defaming texts, sent by someone close to her. The suspenseful atmosphere is just one way Field keeps the audience engaged.
Inside the dream house of Lydia Tár is a young daughter struggling at school, a strained marriage to her concertmaster (Nina Hoss), an inappropriate relationship with her assistant (Noémie Merlant), and the increasingly loud ticking of a metronome at night. With the performance of a lifetime approaching, Lydia pushes everything she deems unworthy of her time aside in the name of perfection (and desire), including the recent suicide of her former colleague Krista, whom Lydia most likely blacklisted after the end of their romantic/sexual involvement. In her avoidance of Krista’s suicide, Lydia also takes interest in a new, young, female cellist (Sophie Kauer), to whom she gives a coveted solo.
Field’s muted, cool-toned palette of the film fills the screen with chilled air and high-strung tension. We are uncomfortably stuck in Lydia’s mess with her. Eventually, Lydia’s actions begin to catch up with her, and we see how quickly she constructs lies, as she pretends to have been assaulted after bruising her face in a fall. At this point, her battered appearance evokes humiliation over sympathy. After she is deposed in court for Krista’s death, we see a somewhat pitiful, somewhat satisfying end to the greatness that was Lydia Tár, now severed completely from her family and driven out of the country to find work — but not before she tries and fails to retake her place on stage in a fit of rage à la Andrew in Whiplash. When Blanchett drops Lydia’s calm, collected persona in the final act, she becomes a woman unhinged, and gives us the sad chaos we’ve been waiting for.
Giving full definition to queer villainy, Cate Blanchett undoubtedly establishes Lydia Tár as a deeply flawed, self-absorbed, horribly brilliant lesbian. While Lydia herself would hate being primarily identified by her sexuality, Tár is arguably only as fresh and compelling as it is because of Lydia’s lesbianism and Blanchett’s performance. Powerful, morally ambiguous female characters have always been queer-coded in their aesthetics and demeanor, but to see the toxicity of an out, married lesbian unfold in such a convoluted way is something seldom seen. There is something to be said about the range of “woman” in this film, as all the (queer) women have different moral compasses and ways of coping. Tár explicitly allows lesbians to be despicable and unhinged too, and it is this kind of unsettling representation that is necessary to deepen the canon of lesbian cinema.