Blanchett’s performance a lesson in brilliance

Tár (M, 158 mins) Directed by Todd Field Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★★

Lydia Tá r is a conductor. But like a modern-day Leonard Bernstein – who she studied under – Tá r has transcended the insular world of orchestral music and become a global celebrity.

Tá r shuttles between New York, where she teaches, and Berlin, where she lives and is the conductor of the impossibly prestigious Berlin Philharmonic.

With her autobiography nearing publication – and a much anticipated recording of Mahler’s imposing Fifth Symphony to prepare for – the next few weeks in Tá r’s life will be defining.

Soon after we meet Tá r, we see her in action, addressing a group of students in New York, introducing herself as a ‘‘basic U-Haul lesbian’’, which seems as pithy as it is unimprovable.

And perhaps we are impressed by her incandescent wit and eloquence, as she verbally crucifies a young man for suggesting that the music of ‘‘dead, white, cis men’’ doesn’t hold much interest or relevance for him. How dare he confuse the artisan with the art, she thunders. And, what would happen if all art was judged by the nature of its maker?

At which point, if our antennae are attuned and we understand that something must be about to derail this Olympian life, we might begin to suspect that Tá r has left herself open to accusations of cruelty.

But how far those accusations will travel – and what substance might be behind them – remains a mystery, at least for a while.

Tá r – the film – is a startlingly literate and blazingly intelligent piece of writing, brought to life in a performance by Cate Blanchett that will enter legend.

Writer-director Todd Field hands Blanchett great mouthfuls of bitterly acidic and cloyingly disingenuous dialogue – often in the same scene – and Blanchett brings it all forth in a performance that swings from imposingly invulnerable to pitiably brittle.

Engrave the awards already. Blanchett won them all the day she agreed to play Lydia Tá r.

Tá r’s fate and her place in the world seem to pivot on a dime, but Blanchett makes her trajectory seem not just plausible, but inevitable.

Seriously, engrave the awards already. Blanchett won them all the day she agreed to play Lydia Tá r.

Tá r unfurls in a procession of precisely assembled interiors. Even when Tá r leaves her Porsche

– a hybrid, naturally – she is surrounded by walls and architecture. This woman is always within a world that has been constructed.

While she appears to have everything at her feet, Tá r is trapped by her own invention.

The very first scene in Tá r perhaps holds a key. I’d have to watch a second time to be sure.

But it seemed to me the confederacy and conspiracy that will bring Tá r down is glimpsed very early on. As in Michael Haneke’s Cache´ (2005), it’s all there in plain sight, if only we have eyes to see.

Field has only made three feature films in a two-decade career. The first, in 2001, was the indelible In the Bedroom – still one of the greatest debuts of all and on anyone’s list of ‘‘films that should have won Best Picture’’.

Five years later came the prickly and disquieting Little Children. And now, after a 16-year hiatus, Field hands in an unalloyed masterpiece.

Tá r is dense, scabrous, chilling, occasionally very, very funny, and absolutely hypnotic.

I strained forward towards every perfect frame, anxious not to miss a syllable or an inflection that might contain another clue to the unveiling of the paradox at the heart of the film.

Whatever awards it wins – who really cares? – Tá r is one of the key films of this conflicted decade.

Tá r is screening now in cinemas.