Darren Brookes

The film Tar is essentially homophobic, exploiting an old Hollywood trope of lesbians as “vampires”, preying on young women. Notice how the Tar character has to be punished at the end of the film, just like the gay and lesbian characters in old Hollywood films, e.g., Sal Mineo’s chatacter in Rebel without a cause. Mineo’s character, by his very nature, transgresses the heteronorms of the culture, disrupting James Dean’s and Natalie Wood’s union as the perfect nuclear model. Notice similarly in Tar how Cate Blanchett’s character refuses to conform to the mores of domestic heteronormative bourgeois life in refusing to live permanently with partner and child, stubbornly maintaining a separate flat, in which to woo young female protégés. Note too the elderly neighbours, a foreboding of Tar’s lonely future of declining mental health, warning this is how you end up if you transgress the social codes. On a practical level, the film is also overly long and laboured lacking economy and sometimes cohesion. There are extraneous scenes, the noises, screams in the forest, the dark interlude in the basement, cryptic messages, which are never fully explained, only possibly pointing to Tar’s diminishing mental state and delusional thinking. Again the association of sexuality and mental illness or the cliche of madness and genius. In either case Blanchett as director/producer shows no empathy for her main character - a grave error for an artist, as it exposes a lack of humanity, basically depicting Tar as a monster. The best scene is the class Lydia Tar conducts at the Juliard, exposing how out of touch the character is with the current generation and zeitgeist - a warning also pointed out to Tar during regular coffee meetings with her old mentor. Tar seems to ignore this lesson, wrapped up in her obsessive thinking and hand washing - allusions to Lady Macbeth?. Tar is oblivious to the warnings of those around her, even to her long suffering partner. Tar flies too close to the sun, and falls from grace, transgressing all of the rules of the stuffy, elitist game. The acting is generally good, especially Cate Blanchett’s, but too many unconvincing scenes spoil this. I do wish the directors had picked a better season, as the gloom of late autumn makes Berlin look a very dark, depressing place. It’s also a pity the exterior of the Berlin Philharmonic had not been featured, as the building is a modernist masterpiece.