‘Didn’t you feel triumphant?’ asks Bernstein in a recorded masterclass that Tár re-watches towards the end of the film. Her fiery temperament in the face of such ‘robots’ and the fervour with which she wields her conductor’s baton are performative symbols of her worthiness. It’s how Tár views anyone who can’t stand on their own as she can and can’t command respect for their talent as she can. It’s also how she derides a class at New York’s Juilliard School of performing arts, in particular BIPOC student Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who dares to oppose Johann Sebastian Bach for his misogyny. ‘There’s no glory for a robot,’ she tells him when he asks to look over her score notes. While she has done what she can to emulate the greats, her contemporaries, notably colleague Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong), want to learn from her.

A similar reverence for figures like Leonard Bernstein (Tár’s supposed mentor) or Gustav Mahler (Tár poses for a photograph re-creating the image used for the Deutsche Grammophon recording of his Fifth Symphony) lingers throughout the film and is then transposed onto Tár herself, whose lengthy accomplishments invite the affections, both professional and personal, of adoring fans. In opening with the credits, he pays homage to the pre-1970s cinematic ‘golden age’, when this was the norm. Questions of legacy, tradition and emulation are tied up in the temporal concerns of Field’s film. On the other, it speaks to the hierarchies of production: where is the director – the ruling creative force – positioned? At the very beginning or the very end? Can the film start without him? On the one hand, it situates the labour and talent of the filmmaking team as foundational. For Field, the siting of the credits at the beginning of the film is an exercise in power, too. ‘You cannot start without me,’ she says of conducting during an early interview scene with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (playing himself). Tár’s prestigious career at the helm of several major orchestras around the globe has laid time at her fingertips. With every passing minute, the threat of temporality presents itself: its infiniteness, its capacity for revelation.

The film opens with a full set of credits: the understood, inevitable closure to most cinematic projects. His creation here, the famed conductor Lydia Tár (a ferocious Cate Blanchett), hovers on the precipice of public and personal downfall as time creeps forward in the narrative. TÁR, American director Todd Field’s first film in 16 years, is consumed by the inevitability of time.

English and History by Cait Woods