Such statements are calculated to bring out the hysteric in a middle-aged Cultural Luminary, and Tár immediately takes the bait, launching into an aggressive defense laced with high-handed pity (for the young man who dares say it) and a more generalized contempt for his cohort. The generation that says things like I’m not really into Bach. Tár is now speaking to a different generation. Here her charismatic lone-genius shtick-which so delighted the gray-haired festivalgoers-falls on stonier ground. As Tár discovers the very next morning, while guest teaching at Juilliard. Their imperious attitudes and witty bons mots are in demand everywhere-until they aren’t. Tár maintains a second apartment in the city, for those moments when she needs privacy.Ĭultural Luminaries make a lot of money. Her daughter, Petra, attends a bourgeois German private school and her wife, Sharon, is first violin in Tár’s own orchestra, the most prestigious in Berlin. Pristine Poggenpohl kitchens and $30,000 sectionals and discreetly disguised safes sunk into great expanses of undivided wall. If the talent is a Cultural Luminary, backstage is likely to be even more glamorous than front-of-house. After which the talent goes home, to their backstage life. Self-fashioning, repeating witticisms they’ve used many times before, pretending to consider questions long settled in their own minds. She is doing what the talent is always doing at these things: acting. See, I start the clock.īut Blanchett has it exactly right. Time is the essential piece of interpretation. We don’t call women astronauts “astronettes.”

As Gopnik recounts Tár’s many achievements, her face remains fixed in its pose of false humility, and when she speaks, she offers her audience a series of eloquent but overly rehearsed bons mots: His interviewee, the (fictional) conductor Lydia Tár, is stiff and self-conscious-actorly, even.

Gopnik, playing himself, is a relaxed and fluid interviewer. They sit together on a New Yorker Festival stage. During the first ten minutes of Tár, it is possible to feel that the critic Adam Gopnik is a better actor than Cate Blanchett.

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