Six minute standing ovation for 'colossal' Cate Blanchett film

Cate Blanchett is a maestro of her craft in Tár, which some critics are calling her magnum opus. One thing is clear: the Australian actor will be up for an Oscar.

Cate Blanchett is a maestro of her craft in Tár, which some critics are calling her magnum opus. One thing is clear: the Australian actor will be up for an Oscar.

The rapturous reception and critical acclaim of a level even beyond what we expect of the double Oscar-winning Cate Blanchett has made one thing clear: the Australian actor will be up for an Oscar for her portrayal in her new film Tár.

A six-minute standing ovation and a raucous crowd applauded Blanchett's performance following the premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday.

The film, the first directed by acclaimed director Todd Field in 16 years, was written for Blanchett and she is in almost every scene. Vanity Fair has declared Tár to be Blanchett's "magnum opus", and the Guardian has favoured her performance as "colossal."

Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, the world’s most outstanding conductor, who has led The Berlin Philharmonic for seven years. Her reputation is suddenly shattered when revelations regarding her personal life emerge.

In some ways Tár is a horror film, one critic suggests.

“Lydia's definitely haunted by something, by the past, by herself, by her experience,” Blanchett says. “She’s someone who's definitely put her past in a box and through her greatest talent has tried to reinvent herself and be saved and changed by the music. So I think you're sensing the dread and I think it’s when you reach the pinnacle, as we see Lydia doing, not only as an artist but as a human being, the only way for her next is down and that takes an enormous amount of courage and that perhaps is a horror movie in itself.”

Tár explores all facets of Lydia’s life, including her love affairs with two female musicians including her violinist partner, Sharon, played by German actress Nina Hoss (Barbara, Phoenix).

Blanchett is no stranger to portraying gay women as she did in Todd Haynes’ 2015 film Carol, and she was Oscar-nominated for her performance.

She was asked about the importance of breathing life into dynamic LGBT women onscreen.

“I think it’s important on a societal level,” she says.

“Homogeneity in any art form is death."

"But I’m very wary of putting up the word importance with the word art, because I don’t see that artistic practice as an educational tool. I think what people do with it after the fact, ‘the thing’ as Todd likes to call it, can be politicised, disseminated, or discussed, or people can be disgusted with it, offended by it, or inspired by it. But that is outside of our control.

“Strangely, I didn’t think about the character’s gender nor her sexuality at all. And I love that about the film. It just is. It’s a very human portrait. I think we have perhaps matured enough as a species that we can watch a film like this and not make that an issue. I find that really exciting.”

Looking back on making Carol she says no other films like that were being made at the time.

Rooney mara and Cate Blanchett in Carol

“Patricia Highsmith’s story was the first story where a woman who loved other women wasn’t redeemed by the love of a man or killed herself, so it’s a seminal piece of work in that and many other respects,” she says.

“But at the time Carol was made, I subsequently realised just how important it became to people. At the time of making it, it was just something that we had to make. I’m not interested in agitprop.

"Whilst there are a lot of hot-button topics that come up in Tár it is not about any of those things. They are plot devices. The film was made in the time in which we live. There are a lot of explosive things in the [#MeToo] films and I don’t want to sound too highfalutin’, but Tár is much more existential.”

Blanchett studied conducting intensely for the role and developed a wild style not unlike that of legendary American conductor Leonard Bernstein, who had been Lydia’s mentor in the story. Variety commends Blanchett’s transformation.

“Blanchett, with long straight hair that gives off an Annie Liebovitz power vibe, plays her with magnetic shifts of mood, so that we register her lordly smile of dominance, her rhapsodic passion and exactitude on the podium (which is heightened by Lydia’s fluent command of German, the language of her favorite composers), and, through it all, her supreme control-freak manner — the way she guards her idealism with a killer instinct.”

Hoss, who likewise studied the violin for her role as the orchestra’s principal violinist, is one of Germany’s leading actresses both in the theatre and on screen. I’ve suggested to her in past interviews that she is the Cate Blanchett of Germany and I mention this at the press conference, where Blanchett suggests I should now be saying something else.

“I’m the Nina Hoss of Australia! I should be so lucky!” Blanchett bellows. “I’ve been stalking Nina for about 10 years now. It’s unhealthy but true.”

In the past the pair have separately played the same stage roles including Hedda Gabler. Hoss admits they share similarities in wanting to work with the same directors and that they have friends in common, but that their casting came down to Field. 

“Cate and I were talking about who might play Sharon and both of us said Nina Hoss at the exact same moment,” Field recalls. “So it was never going to be anybody but Nina and she said yes.”

As for the world of classical music presented in the film, where a woman can be the leading conductor, it is something of a fantasy or a fairy tale.

“There is still no female conductor leading the great old German orchestra throughout the world,” Blanchett notes.

“The structures in the world of classical music are still very patriarchal, the canon is, what women can conduct--generally they get to conduct more romantic music. Now the landscape is changing, but we need that change to become normalised, so it’s a much more healthy artform. We don’t want classical music to become museum pieces.”