Two days later I'm still thinking about it. I mean... it wasn't a bad movie, it just wasn't really a movie.
Everybody keeps comparing this director to Stanley Kubrick. I dislike everything Kubrick made after Paths of Glory, so classical music or not, this movie is clearly not for me. It's deliberately cold, sterile, every color is washed out, every shot gives you claustrophobia. (you as in me)
I'm not going to get into all the things it got wrong about classical music. They really needed a better consultant, because the remedial level shit they don't know is breathtaking - but that's true in movies about every subject which you know anything about. You simply can't expect people who don't know the world from the inside to get it right. The essence of a work of art is not what its world is, the essence is what its world means, and what the world of Tar means is..... I have no fucking idea....
So that being said, there's more to it than that. It does get the 'feel' right of what it means to be at the top of the 'fine arts' in any form. It's a completely sterile thing. There's a reason the Faust myth was so popular in classical music: one way or another, everybody who 'plays the game' at that level sells their soul. Unless your life is truly shit and you have no outlet for your feelings but the page, your time is spent hustling donors, eating in expensive restaurants, travelling to airports in limos, living in hotels, feeding bullshit jargon to interviewers and students and watching them lap it up as though you're a god until you believe it yourself. Bach and Rembrandt did not live lives like that. They may have not been any more talented than Lydia Tar or Philip Glass, but they lived gloomy lives of loneliness and humiliation, and the moment anyone met them, they quickly forgot they were in the presence of Beethoven and Michelangelo; and instead saw the presence of deeply annoying human beings whom you cross the street to avoid. And from these lonely lives, Schubert and Chekhov and Goya created things that can only be created by people who know just how demoralizing life can get. The Lydia Tars of the arts have no idea what that's like. I daresay, even most of the greatest movie directors have little idea. Having to actually live the tragedies of van Gogh and Dostoevsky is what most famous artists dread, and even if it might be the stuff of what truly cosmic art is made, no one should wish that life on their worst enemy.
The problem with Tar has little to do with its treatment of music, or celebrity, or power, or identity, or cancel culture, or separating artist from art, or even the questionable nature of making Lydia Tar a woman; the problem is not even that Tar has a paranormal angle which frames it either as a ghost story or as a series of hallucinations. The problem with Tar is that it tries to be deeply ambiguous about things that we've all discussed every day for the last five years.
There is not a single angle or avenue which Tar explores that culturally aware people haven't explored in conversation with more detail and more ambiguity than Tar ever could. In watching their fall, we all became more obsessed with the Lydia Tars of the world than ever before, and in so obsessing about their descent, we are facilitating their resurrections. Whether they're at all deserving or not, many of them will rise again, because America has no idea how to ignore its celebrities unless their stories are boring, and there's nothing America finds more interesting than a scandal. Like with the listeners to True Crime podcasts, the very people who most recoil at the actions of these celebrities obsessively think through of every sort of ambiguity in their situations as though a part of them absolves the very people they were eager to damn.
A much better movie would be made from Lydia Tar after her fall, because that is the act we're all beginning to see now. It's been more than five years, and so many of these celebrities are climbing out of scandal's muck on youtube, or podcasts, or small movie roles; many of these celebrities are pathological narcissists, all of whom had the limelight taken away from them in the ways that would be more humiliating to a narcissist than anybody else. If a movie were made about this act of their lives, we would get to watch all the personal humiliations, small and large, they'd deliberately put themselves through in order to get back into the limelight.
That's the movie I want to see. In the meantime, the majority of Tar's running time is mostly a movie about classical music that doesn't know much about it, while the substance of the movie happens entirely outside the margins of the frame.
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