The dismaying and unwarranted lesbophobia of “Tár”

It’s shocking to find any praise given to the new film Tár, a pseudo-documentary that turns into a lesbophobe horror movie, featuring strikingly stagey, albeit highly glamorous, acting by Cate Blanchett. The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (a friend and colleague of mine since 1988) actually does play the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, interviewing the star maestro/maestra Lydia Tár before a live audience. Scenes at Juilliard and the Berlin Philharmonie actually happen in Juilliard and the Berlin Philharmonie. And then - all in the same pseudo-documentary vein - the sapphic Tár conspires to wreck musical careers, to promote women musicians of whom she has sexual hopes, and to absolve herself of all blame. At the end, all attempt at plausible realism is dropped: the conductor approaches the podium only to strike another musician to the floor, and quickly finds herself conducting in ridiculously obscure contexts in the Far East. This is the Black Swan of classical music. A great deal of research has been applied to make us feel this film knows its stuff, though why Tár is made to speak of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as if it went beyond other Mahler is a mystery, and it is absurd when she speaks casually of having conducting The Rite of Spring at “the Met”. (The Metropolitan Opera House has given very few performances of Stravinsky’s Rite as a ballet, but the only superstar conductor to present it there was James Levine, its resident maestro, when directing a stage production.)

I found the film Notes on a Scandal (2006, directed by Richard Eyre, written by Patrick Marber after a Zoë Heller novel) staggeringly nasty , homing in on the vindictive cruelty of which a lesbian can be capable, as if trying to imply Lesbians Are Like That. But Tár - written, directed, and produced by Todd Field - goes way further. As Lydia Tár, Blanchett plays a star conductor who manipulates the Berlin Philharmonic administration to further her own sexual crushes, drives one player to suicide, and suffers from paranoid nocturnal fantasies. No, Tár does not imply that all lesbians are lethal and cruel bitches, but, by homing in on the lethal, crazed, cruel bitchiness of this particular superstar while showing us her home life, it strongly implies that this protagonist’s monstrosity is all part of her sexual inclination.

It’s been said Blanchett’s performance is Oscar-worthy. I’ve seen at least three 2022 film performances that do deserve Oscar Best Actress nominations: Lesley Manville in “Mrs Harris Goes to Paris”, Emma Thompson in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”, and Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. I hope I’ll see others. But Blanchett, not for the first time, is gorgeously exaggerated and beautifully grandiose, wholly unspontaneous, and utterly unconvincing (though her American and German accents are perfect). I’ve been watching Blanchett since the 1990s: this melodramatic over-scaling has been obvious since she played Richard Eyre’s “Plenty” in the West End in 1999. It’s intoxicating when she does this kind of over-acting as Galadriel in the Tolkien movies. (Who’s to say elf queens aren’t like her kind of glamorous diva?) In “Tár”, her voice is at its most baritonal, her face is always presented à la Joan Crawford for maximum effect, her conducting seems based on all the most flamboyant features of Leonard Bernstein and Simon Rattle, and she does plenty of the “It’s not acting until they can see the whites of your eyes” performance idiom.

Still, it’s almost a pleasure to argue about over-the-top acting such as this. The subtle exaggerations of Bette Davis are superlative in their way (and in several films she has no exaggerations at all). I guess I can see why Blanchett’s showy acting impresses people here. She evidently knows a great deal about conducting, she handles long takes with ease, and the over-polished intelligent theatricality  with which she speaks passes for a form of characterisation. There is good acting elsewhere here, with exceptional performances by Nina Hoss as Tár’s wife and Mila Bogojevic as their young child.

What’s deeply offensive in “Tár” is Field’s documentary pretence here, put at the service of melodramatic lesbophobia. Let’s pretend that we’re seeing this superstar lesbian conductor off the podium in intimate professional and domestic circumstances - her teaching, her secretary, her wife, her daughter - and then let’s show you how this synthetically “real” person ruins lives, how she cheats on her wife, how she manipulates renowned musical institutions, and how she refuses to take any responsibility for her part in one person’s death.

No such films are made about male conductors. Why not? Bernstein was controversial in conducting, in politics, and in sexuality. James Levine’s long career was eventually wrecked by homosexual scandal. What scandals did you ever hear about women conductors? Field’s point here is that lesbians really can take deviancy further than anyone else into monstrosity. Tár is an appalling production, bizarre to find in 2022.

Saturday 19 November

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Beryl Grey (1927-2022), prima ballerina and artistic director

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Richard Jones’s Covent Garden staging of “Samson et Dalila”