Lydia Tar is a conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic. She is cynical, a lesbian, an opportunist and highly career driven. Lydia lives with her wife Sharon and her little daughter, and relies on her assistant Francesca. She replaces Sebastian in the orchestra with Olga, a woman she finds attractive. Lydia rejects e-mails from old acquaintance Krista, who kills herself, so her parents sue Lydia. A video shows up of Lydia mocking a colored student for his views on J. S. Bach, which causes enough negative public uproar that the board decides to replace Lydia as the conductor, fearing for their reputation. An angry Lydia attacks the new conductor, causing even more negative backlash. As Sharon quits all contact, Lydia goes to the Philippines to hide, and starts composing music for video games.
"Tar" is a movie that works more as a great showcase for Cate Blanchett's acting talent than as a really well assembled story. Blanchett is truly outstanding as the title anti-heroine, a cynical, egoistical conductor, yet the sterile story is just one giant list of disparate episodes and isolated events, without a clear goal as to where it's going. The main plot doesn't set in up until a 100 minutes (!) into the film, when Tar's acquaintance Krista kills herself and triggers an angry media backlash against Tar, upon which the movie contemplates about cancel culture and the difficulty of separating the private life from an artist. This theme is already mirrored in the excellent sequence in the class where Lydia has a public argument with a colored student, Max, who despises Bach because said musician was a "misogynist" and "had 20 children". A visibly irritated Lydia gives a sharp reply: "I'm sorry, I'm unclear what his prodigious skills in marital bed have to do with B minor... If Bach's talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality, and so on, then so can *your's*!" It is a sly swipe at too excessive political correctness trying to find flaws in sometimes trivial things, but it also shows how, just like Max was boycotting Bach, this is paralleled with Lydia who will get boycotted by the public as well for the video in which she mocks Max. At a running time of 158 minutes, "Tar" is definitely overlong, and it wastes too much time on irrelevant episodes. Sadly, except for this incident with Max, the viewers don't see why Lydia is ostensibly such a terrible person. Sure, she is career driven and thus egoistical and opportunistic, but it's nothing to deserve the title of a "bitch". The movie's theme would have worked better if the movie was less "Tar" and more "Whiplash", where Simmons played the obnoxious music instructor tormenting his students, and which would have worked better in the final act, a sort of culmination of Tar's personality. There are neat details and dialogues here and there (36 minutes into the film, Lydia edits her own Wikipedia page to insert a New Yorker source saying that "Tar is one of the most important musical figures of our era"; "He said there was room for only one asshole in the house."), but the storyline is so chaotic and disjointed that the ending feels both abrupt and incomplete at the same time.
Grade:++
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