I love how you never see the girl’s face. Like in this shot, which is kind of a reveal but is so underplayed that you only slowly realize “hey wait … isn’t that the same person as…”.
I’m not sure what moment the gif is showing, so I presumably didn’t catch it either. What is it?
Well, that’s not furniture or a standing lamp in the background. Are you seeing her?
Is she even there??
It’s at the start of one of the scenes where Lydia’s at her rehearsal pied-à-terre. I think it’s the one where she hears and incorporates the dings from the neighbor’s medical device.
The ghost also appears in Lydia’s apartment when she gets up in the night to soothe her daughter:
Gah, now I see! I totally missed that, in both instances. That’s flippin’ creepy!
spoiler for things in background
https://i.imgur.com/VCszEQh.gif
It’s this woman, from the beginning of the movie, and who I posted the screenshot above:
https://i.imgur.com/ieSMrTPl.jpeg
That post is a great unpacking of things, btw @rrmorton and I had much the same reaction as he did. In particular, I think this is one of those movies that intends to be ambiguous. I tend to read the ending as tragic rather than hopeful, but I could see it both ways.
This moment where Tar goes seeking a massage and is confronted with the asian women is one I’ve been thinking about a lot. She’s presented with this woman, number 5, who represents Mahler’s 5th symphony to her:
https://i.imgur.com/Ekhe5RV.gif
What the article doesn’t mention is how her partner has just accused her of treating every relationship in her life as “transactional”, whereas I think Tar has been living under the delusion that everything she’s done has been for/because of the music. This scene is basically the world throwing that back in her face, and saying: “No, number 5 was always transactional. You bought it.” And she’s revolted by that idea.
But when she then goes on to treat the video game orchestra with the same kind of pretentious artifice she always had, my interpretation was that she hasn’t learned anything at all, which is the tragedy of it.
Great points! But there’s a thin line between “pretentious artifice” and “passionate genius” so I’m maybe more drawn to seeing her refusal to learn or back down as somewhat heroic. But, like you said, ambiguity! And that whole third act is in some other realm entirely.
Then there’s whatever is being said in the final shot by depicting those in the audience (us too?) as a literal bunch of monsters.
Well, from a very literal perspective, it’s a bunch of Monster Hunter cosplayers :). Which, knowing that, I think you’re meant to read it as the lowest you could possibly sink and still call yourself a classical music conductor. I think Tar would think so. But is it penance? Is it commitment to treating even “low” art with seriousness?
It’s a great reveal, whatever the case.
I really want to watch Tár now, the mystery is more appealing than the story!
I haven’t watched it so I know nothing, but suddenly I’m reminded of Mulholland Drive for some reason when looking over these scenes (I don’t mind spoiling it for myself).
Yeah, I thought it was supposed to be her nadir but also hopeful. At the start of the film Tar ranted to the student that his favorite composer was unserious and not worth conducting. But here, we see her fully commit to something she would have hated, for a composer that we’re told declined to even meet her.
And I think the final shot is the first time we’re shown an audience that’s actually listening to music to enjoy it, instead of to judge it, exploit it, or fill out rating cards.
Really cool article! My take on the ‘ghost’ is kind of boring in that I think it represents her guilt, but I like that it’s ambiguous. The article has a weird take about the third act that I don’t really understand, since we’re seeing/hearing it(and other weird things) throughout the whole movie.
Overall I liked this well enough. The acting and cinematography were stellar. That being said, maybe I had heard too much of how it tipped a toe into horror and thought there would be more than…a toe I guess. I do think it could have been much shorter and not lost anything.
Yeah, I am similarly unimpressed with the Easter Egg reveal that there may be a figure in the background of a couple of shots. This isn’t Blade Runner or Fight Club where everyone gets excited about something hidden in a few frames of the image, and I’m not sure what the point is if the figure doesn’t have any effect on the story.
Saw it, loved it.
If it is literally a ghost, what difference would it have made to the movie? Tar hurt people around her throughout her career, and it’s coming back to haunt her, that’s all there is to it.
Anyway, she hates 4’33 so she’s alright in my book.
So yeah, give Blanchett an Oscar, she was great!
I agree. This is an very good 110 minute film. The thing being, it’s 157 minutes long. It’s not that those additional minutes are bad; it’s just that all that extra screentime isn’t adding to the overall power of the piece. Kill your darlings; less is more; simplify, simplify, simplify. The first scenes, for example, are great exercises for the writer to work out in detail and at length how this character talks, how she creates her persona, etc. But we the viewer don’t need that daunting amount of material; those scenes kill the momentum of the movie. (And they’re sure to drive anyone who thinks classical music is pretentious and dull to run screaming out of the theater.) Those scenes could have been cut down to a fraction of their current size and done the same job.
Likewise, I don’t find the ghost story and hallucination interpretations compelling - and to be clear, I’m not saying those interpretations are not supported by the movie, the ghost stuff is definitely there, I’m saying they don’t add much if anything to the story.
(Though the idea the last act “is all a dream” doesn’t really make sense, come to think of it … how could Tar, who has never mentioned or been exposed to video games in the entire movie, hallucinate about conducting a Monster Hunter concert when she doesn’t know what Monster Hunter is? Movies that use that structure use foreshadowing to establish for us that the details in the dream were on the character’s mind earlier.)
Meanwhile, despite the length, I don’t think the movie did some of the work it needed to do to sell its ending…
See, I feel it’s a swing and a miss. The problem being, we don’t actually know what Tar’s feelings would be about this. While the movie has shown us a lot about her, but it hasn’t specifically set up how we’re supposed to process this moment.
We do know from the last act that she didn’t come from money, so probably she had to work some gigs she didn’t want to before making it. We know she’s interested in indigenous music, and isn’t afraid to dabble in things. We’re told that her idol and mentor is Lenny Bernstein, who was all for popularizing serious music - he wrote Broadway shows, and had a TV show for kids. And hey, she likes Count Basie! All of that suggests that she isn’t all that snobbish about music itself.
But the ending is presented as a Big Reveal, suggesting that we’re supposed to find it shocking and ironic. I came away with the distinct feeling Todd Field thinks the audience believes having a classical conductor do a video game concert is degrading. I’m just not sure, based on what the movie told us, Tar herself would feel that way.
(Also, video game nerd me is like, “That ending would never happen, because video game music nerds don’t actually give a crap about getting an aging classical conductor who knows nothing of the genre to conduct their concerts: there is a rich ecosystem of talent already in place.”)
This is (part of) what makes it degrading. She’s conducting for a bunch of video game fans who don’t know and don’t care she was close to Bernstein or conducted the Berlin Philharmonic or what she has to say about Bach.
The scene at home shows Tar had an extensive collection of saved Leonard Bernstein cassettes. Was the mentorship another fib?
Absolutely, from the point of view of what the movie is trying to convey. I’m just making the IRL nitpick that the organizers of that kind of a concert would have been unlikely to offer her the gig to begin with. (Why hire someone who’s in the middle of a shitstorm of negative PR when your audience doesn’t care about them?)
Because Tommy Tallarico makes all the decisions on the tour!
I finally watched this over the weekend, and… wow. I don’t know the last time I’ve liked a film so much, and yet haven’t really known what to make of it. The theory posited in the article upthread about the last third all being fantasy doesn’t work for me, but we’re clearly dealing with an unreliable narrator.