Hola, cinéfilos de Hive!
Hello, Hive film buffs!
Today I'm here to tell you about the best film I've seen so far this year, starring the very talented Cate Blanchett and which has for me the best Oscar-nominated performance for Best Actress. It is Tár, a cinematic gem released in the year 2022, which we should all see. I leave you with the review which clearly has spoilers. I hope you enjoy it!
Tár tells us the life of Lydia Tár, a super successful conductor and composer, who teaches at the Juilliard Academy of the Arts and whose main goal is to conduct Mahler's fifth symphony, in order to become one of the few people on the planet to have conducted all nine symphonies of the composer with the same orchestra.
We can see that Lydia maintains a balance between her personal life and her work, as she seems to be in the best moment of her life, but things change with a piece of news.
The news is about a violinist and former student of Lydia's who committed suicide, thanks to the amount of stress caused by the whole story of the music world in which, for some reason, she is involved.
Up to this point you can understand a certain part of the film, but it is much more complex than simply talking about how this does or does not affect her personal and working life, and I will explain it on the basis of a rather controversial scene, one of many in the film.
In the scene she is in one of her classes and one of her students comments that he doesn't like Bach because he was a misogynist, so Lydia, with forceful arguments, makes the boy look like a stupid centenarian in front of the whole class.
The argument with which Lydia refuted her student and defended Bach was basically that one should detach the work from the artist, because the artist's actions do not define how good or bad the work is. This argument makes more sense when we realise that Lydia has her own scandals, as it turns out that she used to seduce her students and ruined the careers of those who did not cooperate.
The student who committed suicide also went through this, as the film does not show it literally, but it does imply that they had an affair. Lydia is involved in this affair, as the girl became obsessed and to get rid of her, Lydia ruined her career.
It is here when all the accusations blow up in her face, where we understand why Lydia has in mind to separate the artist's work, because she knows the quite questionable things he has done, but she also understands that she would be remembered more than anything else for her career and everything she has achieved.
The great thing about the film is that when it all blows up, it doesn't come as a surprise because it's not something that makes us hate the character. Actually, as the film goes on, we are told about each of the questionable things she has done, but we still feel some empathy for her and wanted to see her finish her career.
The film doesn't tell us that cancelling an artist or a person is right or wrong, it just puts us between a rock and a hard place, because we can empathise with Lydia, which makes the ending spectacular, because after losing her reputation, losing her wife, losing her job as a teacher, losing her job as conductor of the Berlin orchestra and seeing a man who is not even close to her conducting the piece she was supposed to conduct, she has no choice but to leave and start from scratch.
At the end of the film we see Lydia entering an auditorium, in some city in the Philippines, about to conduct an orchestra that is going to play a live song from a medieval science fiction film.
The film makes you realise how important this person is and what a great career she has, and it's not fair to see her reduced to conducting such an orchestra, after taking into account all that she had achieved on her own. It is a tragic end for her, which she clearly asked for, but it still hurts because of the empathy that is created with her and her work.
