Tár review – Cate Blanchett is perfect lead in delirious, sensual drama

A second viewing has swept away – with hurricane force – the obtuse worries I had at the Venice film festival about Todd Field’s entirely outrageous, delirious and sensual psychodrama starring Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, the orchestra conductor starting to unravel and unhinge. I had misgivings then about the climactic element of melodrama – which I now see as a deliberate and brilliant stab of dissonance, brilliantly cueing up the film’s deeply mysterious and surreal final section.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt. Her performance will pierce you like a conductor’s baton through the heart – although the real-life conductor Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has complained about the apparent parallels between her own life and Tár’s, and there has never been any suggestion of wrongdoing in Alsop’s own career.

Tár is imagined to be principal conductor of a major German orchestra, addressed by colleagues as “maestro”. She is passionate, demanding, autocratic, with a rockstar prestige and an international touring lifestyle approaching that of the super-rich, and is in a live-in relationship with her first violinist, played by Nina Hoss, with whom she has a child. But there are problems in Tár’s life. She runs a mentoring scholarship programme for women, administered by a tiresome, oleaginous would-be conductor, played by Mark Strong, and there are rumours that this is a source of young women with whom Tár has affairs. Her assistant, played by Noémie Merlant (another would-be conductor) appears to be someone else she is keeping on an emotional string, and she is being stalked by another former mentee who has become obsessed with her; Tár has furthermore conceived a tendresse for a new cellist. Meanwhile, her guest masterclass at Juilliard goes sour when a young student, identifying as Bipoc pangender, presumes to dismiss Bach on ideological grounds.

But this movie is not about anything as banal as “cancellation”. Tár suspects that there is something wrong: she is twitchy, paranoid and insomniac. We know from the outset that she is effectively being spied on. There are strange sounds, intrusions and things out of place. And the music itself amplifies the violence just beneath the surface. It could be that Field has fallen under the spell of the maestro himself, Austrian director Michael Haneke, with the refrigerated sleekness of the film’s look and the ideas about revenge-surveillance, the return of the repressed and the tyranny and cruelty in the classical music tradition.

Tár has a job in which hubris pretty much comes with the territory. She has invented herself through conducting: no other profession and no other kind of musical career could have worked. My second viewing made me see that part of Tár’s loss of control is due to her intense reaction to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, which she wanted to perform with her protege: the extravagance and the derangement of the music. It resonates with her and with us.

• Tár is released on 13 January in cinemas.