Lydia Tar is an American conductor, leading the Berlin Philharmonic, preparing for a performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. We also see her teaching, living life with her wife and child, being magnetised by a new Russian cellist on the scene, and dealing with administrative problems that are sometimes also people. Her life, indistinguishable from her career, is as tight a fit as her conductor's tuxedo (one of which we see being crafted on her body, bespoke and deluxe). But this is a parable of control and, once established, Tar's attempts at professional flexes set her up for the post-hubris plummet.
Writer/director Todd Field knows his classical music. More finely, he knows his twentieth century masters (it's no accident that the piece in balance is one of Mahler's biggies, apart from how it lets him get a Visconti/Death in Venice crack in). This film is formally symphonic. Clear movements that refer to each other and themes stated early and kept to a minimum. The red bouffant in the first scene returns in tiny haunting moments but grows into personal cataclysm. Tar's attraction to the new cellist is a kind of descant on the same line and adopts dissonance eventually. All of the musical thinking of the statement of theme in the interview, all of that assurance and fine honing of the notion of control spreads into detail only to regroup as roaring drama. Really, makes you want to go and bother Malher all over again (well, it does me).
None of this is told in the abstract. If anything we are given a very slight heightening of drama to the everyday (and most of that is due to Tar's position and privilege). Where the film takes its chances is in the theme of haunting. The distant screams Tar hears while jogging, the nagging major third from a neighbouring flat's carer's alarm which she incorporates into her composition, some quietly eerie moments in the dim light of the apartment and what her daughter seems to see build their own connecting phrases to add to the crescendo of crisis.
Carte Blanchett has been speaking publicly of her intention to retire. This film, written for her and placing her first among favourites for the big gong from The Academy, would be going out in style ... in style. The film is too long for its tale but Blanchett's lead is always there to offer a quick refresher towel between moments of crisis or intensity so that the two and a half plus hours are rendered manageable.
If you read the trivia at the film's IMDB page you will learn much of her prep for the role and you'll be left agape: all those tales of De Niro fattening up for Raging Bull or driving taxis, Dustin Hoffmann getting beaten up for Marathon Man and so on, have their modern equivalent here. Blanchett learned conducting enough to lead the Dresden Orchestra to the extent that all music performed within a scene (i.e. not scored for the film) is performed live, including the Bach she plays on piano in the extraordinary single-take teaching scene. Her instructions to the orchestra fall in and out of the German she learned for the part and speaks, in character, with a chiselled flintiness. Her affected posh American accent was finished through hours of listening to the speech of Susan Sontag. That's nothing like all of it.
But if you don't know any of that, you will still be awed by the complexity she brings to the character who would control every last cell of her body if she could. This can be played against our sympathies as the plot unfolds and we see more results of her drives and desires. There is a theme of cancellation in the plot that has taken up some public discourse but happily it is treated with an even hand and must be as the point of it has to do with the classically determined fall from grace of the narrative drive. The final shot might make you laugh or gasp but if it saddens you, ask yourself why.
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