Writer/director Todd Field, a suspiciously deliberate filmmaker (deliberate in output, three features in twenty years; deliberate in pacing; deliberate in what he doesn’t show), makes his chilliest film yet about a chilly (and reckless) Western classical music conductor (a rare woman at the top of her field) who ‘has it all’: Berlin Phil appointment; concert-master wife; child; acolytes (with benefits) to assist & mentor. She’s also due for a fall, fated to be undone by an overblown sense of entitlement, personal hubris and by decisions made thru sexual attraction. Extremely accomplished filmmaking, but with something of a hole right in the center as the dramatic fulcrum feels jerry-rigged purely for dramatic effect when Tar (Cate Blanchett, even better than advertized) pointlessly humiliates a student conductor in a Julliard Music School masterclasss who’s not only chosen to work the student orchestra thru an atonal piece of modern music she disapproves of, but disses White Western (cis)Male composers in general. (Whatever is he doing there? And why would she bother with such easy pickings?) The scene, Tár toying with the nervous lad like a cat with a mouse, designed solely with an eye to a precipitous fall and well-earned comeuppance. It has the uncomfortable feel & texture not of life, but of bad playwriting; a sham set up for the last two acts you'd expect to find in late David Mamet or anytime-at-all Neil LaBute. Fortunately, craft, acting & suspense manage to work around this weakness, especially when Field also turns reckless with a double climax; first in an over-the-top moment of action, then in an over-the-top final ‘reveal.’ Each one making you laugh out loud . . . in a good way.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Preston Sturges humiliates classical music conductor Rex Harrison to a fare-thee-well in UNFAITHFULLY YOURS/’48.
No comments:
Post a Comment