Tár

Kavanah (Conductor Unbecoming)

or

SNR (One Man's Ceiling is Another Man's Noise Floor)
 

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a world-class conductor, having conducted "the five great orchestras" and is the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, she is an EGOT winner, composing for both film and stage, and with a teady contract with Deutsche Grammaphon, has her duties with many fellowships and programs around the world, teaches at Julliard, and is out doing press for her new book coming out called "Tár on Tár."

 

As the joke goes, she has a hard time keeping a consistent job.

 

She could tell that joke in several different languages, is world renowned, is a virtuoso concert pianist (even being able to imitate other virtuosos' playing styles) and does interviews with a breezy combination of expertise and modest self-deprecation, describing herself as a "U-Haul lesbian" married to her concertmaster Sharon (Nina Hoss), with whom she parents Petra (Mila Bogojevic), the six year old daughter. She was mentored by "Lenny" and, being an ethno-musicologist, is well-versed on music of all variations and cultures. She even makes Jerry Goldsmith jokes (how arcane!).

In her lectures, she is passionate and esoteric (but makes sure that she couches it with the common touch for the masses) and encourages her students to be fully involved, and embrace music free of strictures of time-period and cultural origin...or comfort. She really does deserve that "acute" accent in her surname vowel as she is, per the definition (Oxford—only Oxford): "having or showing a perceptive understanding or insight; shrewd." 

Well, maybe leave that last part out. Because she also fits the other definition: "(of a bad, difficult, or unwelcome situation or phenomenon) present or experienced to a severe or intense degree." Intense, certainly. Severe, but muffled in the language of the polite, business-like and the erudite. Still, having a well-considered background can't always save you from being ground in the gears. People can be dazzled by the highbrow, but they get defensive when only one of those eyebrows is raised.

The film starts with Tár being photographed on a cell-phone while snarky comments are posted back and forth. We then hear her encouraging a native singer while the technical credits play out over the screen. This is unusual; the long credits are usually saved for the back-page of a movie (here the cast is saved for last). It's an acknowledgment of just how many souls are involved in a "singular vision," which, despite Tár's fame (or the director's) and their image as ring-master, rely on the hired hands to bring it to reality.

We get an interview with her as part of a media blitz which provides a lot of background, then we see her talking to a smitten fan while her assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) checks her watch for the next "go-to" moment. We see her in lunches with associates, mentors, and patrons. We see her teach a conducting class where she instructs, informs, lectures, cajoles and condescends to her students until one of them just walks out in disgust. Meanwhile, there are the details—one of Tár's protégés has been trying to make contact her only to be ignored and spurned until the young woman commits suicide. Lydia instructs Francesca to delete all of her e-mails. Her daughter is being bullied at school, so Lydia drives her to school, singles out that child and threatens her (in German!) that if she does it again, she will "get" her, and if she tries to tell somebody in authority about it, no one will believe her. Then, there are suspicions that Tár is grooming a Russian cellist (Sophie Kauer); it's happened before and the consequences were dire. Tar's orchestras are in lock-step and sound harmonious. Her staff and associates and lawyers are starting to rebel.

Todd Field—this is his first film since 2006's Little Children—is closely associated—too closely, I think—with Stanley Kubrick. He appeared in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and, while on-set, was subjected to the Kubrickian "grilling" of why he wanted to make a film of In the Bedroom (which he directed in 2001). Too much is made of the connection between the two as their "styles" are very different. But, Tár does share a certain thematic kinship with a thread running through Kubrick's films, that of people being too smart for their own good. Of brilliant people (and systems) being undone by character flaws or unanticipated consequences, or by the mere vagaries of Fate.

There is also the stringent way that Field refuses to "stack the deck" in his screenplay: you see the good in Tár as well as the bad and you see the good intentions and the bad consequences of the forces that undermine her. There's no judgment here. It's simply the environment in which the character operates, one that she has exploited to her gain and utilized to her detriment. One can rail against "cancel culture"—and those on the receiving end of it always do—but, there's always some hurt feelings and wounded pride mixed in when those in power come to the realization they don't have power over people's money or people's time (and how they spend both) and that, however high their intentions, they're just another stall in the marketplace of ideas.

Any artist must consider their audience—just as writers do—even as they bring their own ideas to the fore because nothing exists in a vacuum. If one is going to present music, one must consider the acoustics of where it will be played. And, as is made clear throughout the film, Tár never considers her acoustics, her surroundings. Little sounds annoy her—and the sound design of the movie is brilliant. In the majesty of her work, her interpretation, one wonders what she'd do to the person in the audience who coughs.

 

The film makes no judgment; it just tells a story. It's up to the viewer to draw their own conclusions on what's what. There will be arguments and counter-arguments. Everyone will have their own singular interpretation and reaction. There's no "right" answer, no matter how learned and studied yours might be. Or how prejudiced. For me, it brings up several uncomfortable ironies: how the cultured can be very uncultured when dealing with things that scratch people's sensitivities and how the liberal arts can piss off the disenfranchised and how the fringe can be very parochial.

Five Million Years to Earth

Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit) (Roy Ward Baker, 1968) London is all a-natter about the recent discovery hitting the news—the discovery of the skeletons of "underground ape-men" during construction of the Hobb's End section of the London Underground. Paleontologist Dr. Romey (James Donald) and his assistant Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley) have been called in to study and document the find and Romey speculates that the remains have been there for five million years.

It causes enough of a stir that the British Army is monitoring. They've been busy, informing Dr. Bernard Quatermass (Andrew Keir) of the British Experimental Rocket Group that they'll be joining his enterprise with the intention of employing military uses for the doctor's research, something that raises Quatermass' blood pressure considerably. But, when the excavators (particularly one played by Bee Duffel) uncover a metal object in the dig, Quatermass' new military overseer Col. Breen (Good Lord, it's Julian Glover!) invites the good doctor along to have a gander.

The military thinks its unexploded ordinance, but it's like no bomb they've ever seen: for one, the metal isn't magnetic, and it resists any attempts to cut through it with an acetylene torch—the damned thing doesn't even warm up. And the soldiers who've touched it for any length of time develop frost-bite symptoms. The substance is harder than diamonds, so it didn't come from the Nazis ("you ask von Braun" says Quatermass).

Original construction on the tube was in 1927, and about that time, Hobb's End was abuzz with rumors of spooks and spirits with sightings of a frightening type— "the figure was small like a hideous dwarf." There are scratch-marks on the walls of the abandoned tenement, and a local bobby gets the sweating yips inside the ruins. Appropriately, the place used to be spelled "Hob's End"—"Hob" being another name for the devil. It seems whenever someone digs in the area, "something" gets disturbed...and not in a good way.

That accelerates when attempts to get inside a sealed chamber of the metal "bomb" are attempted using a Borazon drill. It is unsuccessful, but the screeching caused in the process has an unnerving effect on the operator, Quatermass, Breen and Romey. Still, it does have a subsequent effect. The chamber begins to open, and inside is a honey-combed chamber with large insectoid creatures, long dead, that begin to disintegrate with their first contact with the air. Romey and Quatermass extract what they can and take the samples back to examine.

The upshot of all this is that those creatures came from Mars five million years ago in a colonization effort and finding only primitive hominids, used their technology to advance the race on the path to what would, at some point, become homo sapiens. How this is all determined is rather muddled in the explanation, as is a crucial sub-plot involving Romey's development of a gizmo that can tap into the ancient human psyche—wrestling with our alligator brains, as it were. A plan is made to use the device to record the readings when a subject is near the "bomb," and it creates a recording of hordes of hopping creatures in a marching pattern that, despite the primitive special effects, looks pretty darn good from reading brain-waves.

It seems the Martian locusts still have the power to influence us, and when the scientists' continued attempts to figure out what it is they're trying to figure out, disaster strikes in the form of a power cable hitting the bomb and sending out blasts of psychic energy that turn people crazy and start ripping up the infrastructure. Lord, we're turning into Martians! This must have seemed entirely uncivil, not to mention not posh in the England of the 1960's. And it's only through grim determination, self-sacrifice, and a conveniently placed crane, that everyone survives enough to take on the clean-up involved.

It isn't that it's bad. It's quite good in its ideas and the acting is professional, and even convincing, in even its dicier places. Having seen the original BBC teleplay, the film version was certainly compromised by the shorter story time and Hammer Studios' reluctance to put on the "what it all means to us" coda that sobers things up considerably, and the higher budget, for some reason, just distances the thing a couple steps from believability.

But, the ideas are there—that we're all just the product of some tinkering from another source, and that the dead can still have a powerful effect on the living—and are just creepy enough to raise the goosebumps and cause one to turn on the lamp (just in case). And the "common-folk" type of writing that seems to have leeched right out of movies in favor of bland archetypes.

It's one of those movies that would be a marvelous starting point for a remake, with some good ideas to germinate and just a bit more time to clean up the exposition. It always seems a better idea than to (as is the financial trend) to update past hits only to see them fall short.