Notes of complexity in Cate Blanchett’s Tar turn
Cate Blanchett’s preparation for her role as a conductor was all-encompassing when she took up the ‘terrifying gauntlet’ thrown to her by director Todd Field. But there was also pleasure in the process.
“It’s so nice to hear the ocean,” says Cate Blanchett, breathing in deeply. The actor is standing before a balcony overlooking the teal waters of the Venetian lido. She appears as a silhouette, perhaps more of a sartorial trick than anything else, given the sun is behind her and she’s in head-to-toe black: oversized blazer, long pleated chiffon skirt, chunky lace-up brogues that shine like a new penny.
It’s the first day of the Venice Film Festival in late August 2022 and Blanchett is here not in the capacity of jury president, as she was in 2020, but as an actor unveiling a new project to audiences for the first time. Her movie Tár is the highly anticipated first film from director Todd Field (In The Bedroom, Little Children) in some 16 years. Blanchett plays a fictional conductor at a very real orchestra whose life, over the course of the two hour and 38 minute movie, falls spectacularly to pieces. Hers is a bravura performance, a showcase for Blanchett’s unique ability as an actor to embody both the technical and the profound, career-best work in a career that is not short of career bests. Remember, Blanchett already has two Oscars; her performance as Lydia Tár looks set to net her another. Just these past few weeks, she was named Best Actress at the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards for the film.
But all this is still in the future – on that hot August morning in Venice, Tár is yet to hold its first public screening. Blanchett turns from the view and smiles, moving towards the couch and taking a seat. A salty breeze ripples through the room. The next thing Blanchett does is order a coffee. “Doppio espresso,” she requests. A few minutes later, a discreet hand deposits one with a whisper on the coffee table. Blanchett drops a slice of lemon into her cup and stirs elegantly.
Venice holds a special place in Blanchett’s heart. She first attended the film festival in 1998 to premiere Elizabeth, the majestic biopic that would launch Blanchett into the atmospheric vacuum of movie stardom. She was just 29 years old. “I didn’t know where I was or what I was,” Blanchett smiles. “Someone had literally thrown a dress at me, I didn’t know what a red carpet was … I can barely remember the screening. I think I was in absolute shock.” Over the years she has returned to Venice several times, to fete a movie or, during the pandemic, to judge them. Blanchett served as the jury president of the festival in 2020, a strange year for cinema after most of them had been shut for months. “That was a remarkable privilege and experience,” Blanchett enthuses. “It’s always an amazing thing to have the time to sit with a bunch of really interesting cinephiles and talk about cinema.”
It almost goes without saying, but Blanchett is a true cinephile. It’s the reason why she became so excited about Tár in the first place, a project that was written for her by one of cinema’s most elusive talents. The American filmmaker Field has only directed three features, including Tár, but he has also acted, written screenplays, scored soundtracks and was mentored by the auteur Stanley Kubrick. (Field played the pianist in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.) Blanchett fondly describes Field as “a renaissance man”. “Most people like that, they’re a jack of all trades, a master of none,” she reflects, but not Field. “He can literally do it all.”
When her agent informed her that Field had written a script in a matter of just 12 weeks during the pandemic – his first completed screenplay in more than a decade; “I think it erupted out of him,” Blanchett jokes – and that he had written the titular character, a prickly conductor high on her own genius whose downfall becomes a spectator sport among the intellectual elite, expressly for Blanchett … Well, what’s a cinephile to do? “It’s a rare and special thing when he decides to make a movie,” Blanchett explains. “I’m normally very slow at reading scripts – I get distracted very easily – but I sat down and read it in one go. And then I had to pick it up and read it again.”
Tár is a complex high wire act. “I couldn’t possibly tell you what it’s about,” Blanchett joked, at a sold-out screening for the movie in Sydney in November, “nor would I want to.” The story ultimately interrogates both one woman’s abuse of power and the scaffolding in place that allows such abuse to happen. The conductor Marin Alsop last week criticised the decision to centre this plot around a woman, but as Blanchett herself explained, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, “it’s a meditation on power, and power is genderless”. In fact, the genius of TÁR is that its tyrannical central figure also happens to be a once-in-a-generation talent – and a woman. But is there a specifically perverse motive for wanting to watch a woman be exposed so momentously? “It’s not just gender based, it’s a thing that humans do,” Blanchett counters, to Review. “The Germans have that fantastic (word), it’s the schadenfreude syndrome.”
“Someone’s gender, sexual persuasion is still something to be remarked upon when they’re in positions of power because the colour, the shape, the size of the person in that position may have changed but the structure of the system that they are operating and leading has not,” Blanchett continues. “Already, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have a pejorative taint around them – already! So there is still an element (in the film) of ‘Who does she think she is?’ And speaking to many conductors I’ve had the great pleasure to meet, who are superb musicians and their talent is unassailable and unquestionable, still them standing on the podium is, somehow, 70 per cent of that is seen as a political act.” To have to constantly reassert yourself as an artist first, before anything else, is “boring in the extreme”, Blanchett declares. “But I understand the rage that you constantly have to put aside,” she adds. “You don’t think about your gender until someone closes the door because of it, or makes you aware of it, or gaslights you.”
The film opens with a bravura 10-minute sequence in which Lydia Tár is interviewed by famed New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik about her art form. Their volleyed conversation tells you everything you need to know about this imperious, self-mythologising character. The next hour or so of the movie is the most exquisite kind of window dressing, in which Field bolsters the authenticity of his fictional protagonist, a woman obsessed with the trappings of her own celebrity as she prepares to conduct a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth symphony. The google search “Is Lydia Tár real” yields more than 3½ million results for this very reason. The world is so real, so meticulously controlled, that the cracks in the surface aren’t immediately clear, the way they wouldn’t be if you were the one living in Lydia’s impeccably appointed Berlin apartment with her wardrobe full of impeccably appointed Armani suits. The cracks aren’t immediately clear and by the time they are it’s too late.
Tár is a process movie; it follows Lydia as she prepares for the stage. As such, the process behind the process was all-encompassing. “It was such an all-consuming game changer of a film in so many ways that I haven’t yet unpicked, personally or professionally,” Blanchett reflects. “I can’t imagine a time when I wasn’t in dialogue with Todd.” From the moment she read the script the pair spoke three or four times a week; they would text at two in the morning about minuscule details of characterisation. “We spoke pretty much every other day, and it was all I thought about to be honest, even though I was – sorry, other directors – working on other things at the time.” I ask when these conversations began. “I can’t remember when we did it,” Blanchett frowns. “What year are we in now?” She laughs. “You know, I used to ask what time it was. Then I asked what day of the week it was, and now I actually ask, because I genuinely don’t know, what year is it? I keep saying it’s to do with the time warp of the pandemic, but I think it’s early onset dementia in my case.”
Blanchett was living in Budapest during pre-production making Borderlands, an action-packed adaptation of a popular video game. “I found an amazing concert pianist,” she says, “I started having lessons. It all went from there.” The actor began studying conducting, poring over videos of luminaries including Claudia Abbado, Bernard Haitink and Emmanuelle Haim. She learnt German. “No one’s interested in an actor’s homework,” Blanchett demurs. But is homework something she enjoys? Did she relish the challenge? “When you say challenge, read: a terrifying gauntlet thrown by Todd,” Blanchett grins. “I was overwhelmed by the demands at first,” she admits. “But the character is demanding. And I think I’m demanding of myself.” (This, she says, is happily where the similarities between herself and Lydia Tár begin and end.) But Blanchett soon found joy in the process. “It’s funny, when there’s so much to do, you have to take a bite of the elephant each day,” she reflects. “And very quickly … I had this rush of pleasure.”
It reminded her of something the playwright Michael Gow told her and her husband Andrew Upton when they took over leadership of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) in 2008, an experience she describes as “pleasure upon pleasure”. “You will be running an organisation 75 per cent of the time, and 25 per cent of the time you will be able to escape into the rehearsal room,” he advised, “so when you are in the rehearsal room, be there and love it with every fibre of your being.” Blanchett loves the rehearsal room. Perhaps Lydia Tár did one day too, but the film showcases just how deeply this woman has separated herself from what Blanchett calls “the joy of the thing”, and in that separation, exposes her shortcomings.
Blanchett actually spent a lot of time thinking about the STC while making Tár. She describes both as formative experiences for her, ones that rewired her thinking and pushed her beyond her limits. When Blanchett accepted the role as artistic director at the STC, she was 38 years old. “Which is not a time most people would choose to leave the film industry,” Blanchett adds, “although I’m always wanting to leave the film industry.” It was only a few years after she won her first Oscar, in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator; she was a celebrated actor and soon to be the star of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal. Taking the job would mean rooting her in Sydney, at that pre-pandemic point about as far away from Hollywood as it was possible to be. “I could see the terror in everyone’s eyes, thinking, ‘What are you doing?’” Blanchett recalls. “But I knew in my water there was a deep, game-changing opportunity. So I ran towards it.” Just as she ran towards Tár, one of the most demanding roles of her career that has resulted in her most indelible performance. “I’m pretty crap at a lot of things,” she reflects. “Most things. But I think I have good instincts.”
Tár is in cinemas on January 26.