Tár is widely considered a film that was badly overlooked in this year’s Academy Awards with Everything Everywhere All at Once sweeping all of the categories that it should have won instead. This is of course the much more sophisticated film and it’s brimming with subtleties and masterful performances. Yet it’s also such an ambiguous work, and so unevenly paced and full of odd details in a way that I can hardly believe is intentional. I really wanted to like this but I’m not sure that I actually do.

Lydia Tár is a celebrated female conductor working at the Berlin Philharmonic. She is due to conduct a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and release an autobiography. Her assistant Francesca handles her schedule and personal communications while discreetly remaining in the background. While lecturing at Juilliard, she confronts a student who dismisses J.S. Bach for being a white hetero cis man. She berates him and encourages her students to put the art before the artist. When the orchestra is auditioning for a new cellist, she happens to notice that one of the applicants is an attractive young Russian woman named Olga. She changes her scorecard to ensure that Olga is accepted. Meanwhile there are accusations of similar incidents of past favoritism and a former protégé, Krista, commits suicide after Lydia blacklists her by telling everyone not to hire her. At home, she is married to Sharon who is also the principal first violin player of the orchestra and they have an adopted daughter together named Petra. Lydia and Sharon’s relationship becomes strained when her attraction to Olga becomes obvious to everyone and she herself seems to suffer from hallucinations and delusions.

On the face of it, this looks like the familiar story of someone in a position of authority abusing their status to demand sexual favors from subordinates, albeit with the twist that the main character is a woman. Yet look closer and it’s just the opposite. Lydia’s behavior is ethically questionable but never quite crosses the line into outright abuse, at least on camera in this film. Something may have happened when Lydia, Francesca and Krista were on a trip together in Peru to experience their music but we don’t know exactly what. What is not in doubt is that once the accusations start flying and edited video clips of Lydia being politically incorrect is spread on social media, her career takes a nose dive. She gets shut out of events, is ostracized by colleagues and the pressure seems to cause her to undergo a complete nervous breakdown. The pacing of the film drastically changes as her life and career collapses around her. While it begins at a languid pace, going into great detail about Lydia’s work and her musical opinions, towards the end, it skips in time so much that it all feels surreal. I believe the intent of director Todd Field is to capture the manic feeling of how quickly a previously respected figure can fall from grace. I disliked it however as it’s so unbalanced and seems to suggest that the fall of a celebrity is less interesting than showing her at the peak of her powers.

I would have liked this film more if it had been more grounded, doing without the drastic acceleration of the pace at the end, and laying off on the whole mental illness aspect. Having Lydia suffer from hallucinations and experiencing surreal encounters on top of it being a debate over cancel culture feels like muddying the waters. I’m not certain what the intent behind the inclusion of this aspect of her character is, unless it is to say all creative geniuses are, to some extent, crazy. This line of thought suggests that if we want to enjoy the wonderful works of art that they create, we must be prepared to accept some of their foibles and eccentricities and this might well include some level of domineering behavior. Perhaps it’s even saying that playing favorites is just part of life for those at the top of the food chain. The film is still careful to set limits, showing how she genuinely loves her adopted daughter, and feels revulsion at outright prostitution of young girls. Overall however, it’s clear that the film wants the viewer to be empathetic towards someone in Lydia’s position, arguing that cancel culture has cast too wide a net and deprived us of too many creative talents.

This is a remarkably bold position for a film to take and I’m surprised it didn’t receive more blow-back. It would never have been able to get away with it if it used a male protagonist. I’d also agree that it’s a very rich and well made film. Personally however the combination of the choices that went into it, makes it impossible for me to say that I truly liked or even enjoyed it. It’s also easy to tell that this would never have won in the Academy Awards. It’s just too strange and unconventional with a stance that is too outré to be acceptable.