Dear Tár,
This movie has earned the following sticker(s):
Disclaimer: I am but a wee small guy looking at the world through a specific lens and commenting on it. I will be wrong. I will miss things. I won’t always have the hottest take and I’m sure I will be problematic at times. Please be kind when reading these. I am just an imperfect human trying to connect and feel alive.
Tár drags us on a journey. It is not the hero’s journey but a look at what must come next: the hero’s denouement.
We are asked to debate Lydia Tár’s life and existence as a highly successful composer under old world power structures.
She has made her way with no excuses or acknowledgement for how hard it was for her due to her gender and sexuality (and therefore removing herself entirely from the struggles of minorities in the arts in the generations after her).
She endlessly maintains that the art created and the artist’s personal life are entirely separate and should not influence our appreciation of said masterpieces. She is not asking for forgiveness, she is asking us to forget and remove her disgressions entirely from the work she has accomplished.
Themes and recent news
The fall of great artists due to their god problem of being human
Intergenerational Relationships: Baby Boomers vs GenX vs Millennials vs Zoomers
The ever decreasing need, and loss of desire for, worshipping intellectuals and intellectualism (tied with the coming of fully realised Artificial Intelligence which will further remove our need)
The growth of the new way of being and the intergenerational reactions to power structure changes
An analysis of the patriarchy and how it negatively affects everybody who leans into it (even those it temporarily benefits)
Apocalypse | Revolution | magic
The magic here is the ability to hold the duality: genius and monster. We hold it as we watch. Our hero is a villain. She holds it - and over the course of the movie, her life splits apart as she wrestles with her duality: knowing she is wrong and refusing to acknowledge she is wrong at the same time.
She is the wizard, pulling too hard on the thread of genius and using that thread to ignore all of the behaviours she thinks it excuses including horrors committed to others by herself and her maestros; beethoven, bach, wagner.
Unable to reckon with the power she has wielded ruthlessly - often most ruthlessly against her own gender and companions - Tár undergoes an emotional and professional breakdown ending a once-valued almost-perfect career and finishing out our time together occupied in a position that she would once have considered as the lowest application of her genius. We are not enlightened as to her current thought processes. We view her new life without seeing her thoughts.
The revolution is in the way she is finally held accountable - the younger ones killing themselves and their careers in order to not be prisoned in the power dynamic any longer.
We do not get a strong glimpse of any redemption or rehabilitation (nor do we see the re-emergence of any old behaviours as such). Without a doubt she is feeling the consequences of her actions but on whether she accepts herself as the one who led herself there, we have no true insight.
Wishes
That more was said and shown of her Apocalypse. Was the final act deliberately left devoid of energy and explanation so that we aren’t left with any crescendo or incredible end? It feels like a more bleak but honest take on things: most of us die far from the height of our most powerful years.
The artist honors the higher purpose but that doesn’t always mean they will receive full emotional growth and the gift of immortality along with that greatness.
The big question we are left caressing: Is there any room in apocalypses for redemption?
I don’t know and Tár doesn’t lean one way or the other in letting us know if growth happened or if the cycle will repeat.
3/5