I’m glad to say that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and I both had the same feeling about Tár and The Banshees of Inisherin. Both had music at their centre and were the darlings of the critics, but both were vastly overrated and neither won a single award.
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Tár first. I’m sorry, what a turgid piece of nonsense. The director Todd Field seems to be a nice chap, but he definitely knows how to alienate an audience with a movie that begins with a brief shot of the screen of a mobile phone, then four excruciatingly boring minutes of end credits. It feels like something has gone horribly wrong in the projection booth.
Cate Blanchett is a magnificent actor, but she looks uncomfortable in this film, desperately trying to give life to Field’s deathly words. In fact, I would nominate Tar (I’m sorry, I can’t bring myself to use the accent on the ‘a’ ) for The Most Banal Piece of...
For the most banal dialogue in a movie ever, Guy Noble cites a passage in the movie Tár. So lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring? I think not.
First a bit of context: Conductor Lydia Tár is talking to her principal clarinettist, Knut, about a note given to her during a rehearsal of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 by her assistant, Sebastian.
Lydia is an overweening, snippy, ruthless professional climber whose ambition and paranoia lead her to believe that even the mousy Sebastian is a threat.
How to deal with the troublesome Sebastian?
Well, Lydia is pretty sure Sebastian’s note was musically uninformed.If she can confront him, score in hand, she will have won an advantage. She is shrewd enough to realise that corroboration from Knut will eliminate any suggestion of bias or ill-will, so summons Knut to her office for a conference about the matter.
I have looked at the score and I think I have come up with the passage in question: Mahler, Symphony No. 5, Movement III Scherzo, beginning at Rehearsal 12 (Eulenburg).There is a first clarinet arpeggio passage marked p accompanying a melody on the first violins marked pp. Other instruments, horn obbligato and celli, are also marked p, but it is the clarinet that stands out because of the busier writing.
Sebastian mistakes this for poor performance balance, whereas it is in fact a typically Mahlerian ironic inversion of roles – the accompaniment impertinently usurping the melody.
Seen in this context, Lydia and Knut’s conversation is plausible, and indeed necessary, to pinpoint Lydia’s character development at this point in the movie.
One gets the unsettling feeling that Sebastian is about to get a good talking to (and the boot) from Lydia, and indeed he does.
Lighten up!