Todd Field’s first film in sixteen years is a long, cold, exact portrait of a conductor whose power is running out, and Cate Blanchett fills every frame of it. It runs twenty minutes too long and refuses to say what it thinks. We recommend it warmly.
Todd Field has not made a film since Little Children in 2006, and he has come back with a portrait of a woman used to being the most important person in any room. Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) conducts a major Berlin orchestra, and the film opens with Adam Gopnik, playing himself, reading her achievements to a New York audience for what feels like several minutes while she sits and lets him. Field then spends 158 minutes watching what she does with all that. It is cold, exact and good, and it asks for more patience than it always repays.
The scene that tells you what you are in for comes early. Lydia takes a masterclass at Juilliard, a student says he cannot get on with Bach because of how Bach lived, and she takes him apart. Florian Hoffmeister films it in a single take that follows her round the classroom, so there is no cut to hide behind and no reaction shot to tell us what to think. Blanchett does it at conversational volume, sitting at the piano, tapping out a few bars. We laughed at nearly every line, and about halfway through we noticed we were enjoying watching a powerful woman humiliate a twenty-year-old, and the laugh curdled. That is the film’s method: it lets you like her and then sends you the bill.
Back in Berlin the film goes quiet. Marco Bittner Rosser gives Lydia and her partner Sharon a flat of bare concrete and long corridors, where a footstep carries, and Hoffmeister lights it in flat grey so the rooms look like the inside of a recording studio. Bina Daigeler puts Lydia in dark tailored suits, and a scene of two tailors fitting her for one tells you how much of this woman is cut and pressed. Hildur Guðnadóttir has written almost no score. What we hear is Mahler’s Fifth in rehearsal and then, in the flat at night, a metronome ticking in a drawer, a doorbell, a woman screaming somewhere in a park while Lydia is out running. We spent the middle hour listening for the next small wrong noise, and those unnerved us more than anything in the plot.
Nina Hoss plays Sharon, the orchestra’s first violin, and does most of her acting by watching: from the strings, from the bed, from a doorway when Lydia comes home late. She is the one person who knows exactly what Lydia is, and Hoss lets us see her deciding how much of it she can afford to know. Noémie Merlant’s Francesca, the assistant, has learned to keep her face still. Sophie Kauer’s Olga, the new cellist, is not afraid of Lydia, and the film wisely never explains why. Mark Strong is Eliot Kaplan, a banker who conducts on the side and wants to be told he is good.
Monika Willi cuts the film in ellipses. Conversations begin halfway through, scenes end a beat before their point lands, and much of what matters happens off screen, in emails Lydia deletes and in the name of a former student, Krista Taylor, that people keep not saying. Field never shows us what Lydia did. He shows the aftermath and the faces of the people managing it, and leaves us to decide how bad it was. A few critics have called this cowardice, or the film siding with her against her accusers. We do not read it that way. It is on nobody’s side, and it does not need to make her stupid to make its point.
It is too long. The second hour circles the same three rooms for a stretch where nothing tightens, and Julian Glover’s retired conductor, Andris, exists to give Lydia someone to be nostalgic with and not much else. Then the last twenty minutes take the film somewhere we will not describe. The tone shifts hard, some of the audience we saw it with laughed, and we still cannot say whether Field means it as punishment, joke or release. We have come round to thinking he does not mind which we pick.
Blanchett is the reason to see it, and it is not a small reason. She conducts, speaks German and plays the piano on screen, none of it looks like a stunt, and the film’s best passages are simply her in a black shirt in front of an orchestra, working. See it in a cinema if you can, for the Mahler and for the silences, which are doing as much as the music. It runs 158 minutes. You will feel about twenty of them.
