The void at the heart of Tár

For a film that has, if you want to be blunt about it, tanked at the box office, Tár has provoked a disproportionate amount of conversation. It’s possible that the discourse around the film – about a powerful, highly successful and extremely problematic conductor called Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett – is as interesting as the film itself. I’ve heard multiple, conflicting interpretations of Tár: that it’s a disgraceful misrepresentation of the field of classical music; that it’s all too real; that it’s all too surreal; that it carries an intellectual heft that is rare at the movies; that it’s not half as clever as it thinks it is; that it’s not about conducting, it’s about power; that it’s not about power, it’s about narcissism; that it’s a fascinating, even-handed anatomisation of “cancel culture”; that it is actually a “regressive” movie that takes “bitter aim” at identity politics. Then there is an extensive online debate devoted to decoding its eerie final act. There’s something exciting about a film that is such an open text, that demands so much discussion.

It is not unproblematic, though. The classical music world is talking about Tár, and not in a good way.

The anxiety derives, not least, from the fact that the biography of the central character bears more than a passing resemblance to that of conductor Marin Alsop. Alsop herself has criticised the film, and I have some sympathy with her. Tár, among other things, is a bully and an abuser, and Alsop is not. Her wider point, though, is that the kind of abuse committed by Tár – blackballing, using power to extract sex – is unhappily present in classical music, but the perpetrators, known largely by rumour and word-of-mouth rather than, yet, by open accusation, are men.

The counter-argument to this perspective is that the film isn’t really “about” classical music in any meaningful way. But that would be to overlook the fact that the film does, in fact, want to tell us something about art, and artworks about art often have an intriguing meta-narrative to tell. Consider other films set in the world of classical music, or adjacent to it. There’s Amadeus, of course; Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Denis Dercourt’s The Page Turner, the Du Pré biopic, Hilary and Jackie, Shine, A Late Quartet.

Not all of these films are about abuse and violence,

but all of them deal, in one way or another, with obsession and mental illness. I can’t escape the notion that for film-makers, classical music offers a means of representing some of their darkest, most twisted thoughts about art and creativity.

Films about cinema, by contrast, tend to be coloured by nostalgia or sentimentality (think of La La Land, or Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light). Steven Spielberg’s latest film, The Fabelmans, has a little of both: it is, really, Spielberg’s own Bildungsroman, and – of course! – there is an early moment in which the main character, Sam, goes to the cinema for the first time as a child. Naturally, we see the reflected light from the screen play over his face; naturally, by these means, the flicks indelibly work their sorcery on him.

The Fabelmans is much more interesting than this description suggests and, like Tár, it has something to say about power, in this case that which is invested in the bearer of the movie camera – the unwilling holder of secrets, the hero-maker, the manipulator. The Fabelmans, however, is touching and accurate on what art actually is. There’s a lovely hint of this in its punning nomenclature: the name Spielberg is reminiscent of the German or Yiddish for “play”; the word Fabelman of the word for “story”. In this movie, stories arise out of play.

Joy, playfulness: these are qualities entirely absent from the vision of art presented by Todd Field’s Tár.

There’s one film I have not mentioned that is about conductors and composers, and also ballet: Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948). Here too there is abuse, and obsession, and mental illness. Like The Fabelmans, like Tár, it suggests that art and domestic life may be impossible to reconcile. But unlike Tár, amid its darkness, it offers a joyous image of what it is to love art, be an artist, to be part of a company of performers. Unlike Tár, which invokes, rather than has anything particularly interesting to say about Mahler, The Red Shoes contains a strange and lovely artwork in itself in the form of the ballet-within-the-film that is also called The Red Shoes. It’s a film that has made generations of impressionable youngsters grow up into artists. Will Tár ever have that galvanising effect? Discuss