by Mathilda Hallstrom, Staff Writer

Lydia Tár is being haunted. She hears screams in the forest and faint two-tone beeps through the walls of her apartment; she wanders abandoned corridors and finds clandestine patterns etched into her belongings. Lydia tries to outrun most everything which portends her, every gash in the fabric of reality she has made for herself, but again and again, she finds herself haunted.

The best part about Tár, Todd Field’s psychological drama depicting the denouement of Lydia herself, is that it begs to be interpreted. Field’s story is dependent on his trust of the audience: the plot is littered with loose ends, questions posed without clear answers. Field knows that his story is a temporal one — Lydia and her world exist in two hours and thirty-eight minutes of exposition, and as such, every moment, every frame are crucial to attaining a grasp on Lydia as she is presented to us. 

Somewhat paradoxically, it is this very interpretive nature that threatens Lydia’s livelihood. Both her bad behavior and her ensuing self-protective rhetoric are contingent on her ability to spin webs and keep the people in her life firmly intact within them. As described by Lydia herself in the film’s opening scene, an onstage interview with the New Yorker, her role as conductor commands a mastery of power: “Time is the essential piece of interpretation. You cannot start without me.” In work and in life, Lydia is devoted to controlling the clock.

In the scope of the film, Lydia is first presented with the threat of transparency while administering a masterclass at the Juilliard School, a scene in which she is surrounded by the next generation of her kind. Having raised the query of origin in interpretation — namely, a disavowal of “Bach’s misogynistic life” — the young student Max finds themself cornered by Lydia’s ideology. “Don’t be so eager to be offended,” she tells them, “the narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity”.

In this scene, Field renders Lydia’s motive perceptible: to uphold, at all costs, the very system which threatens her in the first place. Lydia Tár, née Linda Tarr, is afraid of her own identity. She is a white gay woman, one who has climbed her way to the top not by, as she sees it, embracing her identity, but negating it. She addresses this plaintively during the New Yorker scene: “...as to the question of gender bias, I have nothing to complain about.”

But she sees something in the distance, that rising tide of the next generation which exemplifies all that she fears. She is enticed by the concept of identity, certainly — she takes a necessary interest in the origins of the works she conducts, but she insists on letting the music speak for itself. The very suggestion of the work’s form being overshadowed by its context threatens the canon as it exists; it threatens the world that Lydia has learned and accepted and fights to uphold. 

And Lydia, 49, knows that her time is coming. She finds herself confronted repeatedly by the inexorable peril of aging: she observes her assistant conductor, Sebastian, a 70-year-old-man whom she moves to replace for the very matter of his old age. Additionally, that aforementioned two-tone sequence which she hears through the walls belongs to an elderly neighbor of hers, the sound of a Smart Caregiver system, a fact she learns upon discovering the woman naked, helpless, and covered in feces. All around her, Lydia sees signs of the future, of what might become of her legacy.

It seems that this fear of the inevitable is what informs Lydia’s intimate interest in her young female pupils. She is quickly enthralled by Olga, a talented young Russian cellist whom she takes under her wing. Upon inviting Olga to her private studio, the young woman, often naïve in her mannerisms, notices an original composition Lydia has made little progress on, progress being a noted replication of that haunting two-tone noise. As noted by Field’s screenplay, Olga changes it without a thought, “indifferent to the power differential and the boundary line she just crossed.”

 Lydia seems, in a way, envious of the young woman’s ingenuity, her ability to produce something new. Lydia is unable to produce anything new; she can only mirror what is around her. 

In music, Lydia finds questions and answers, a cycle of fulfillment. In her own life, it’s not so simple. Instead, Lydia finds fulfillment in her manipulation; she does what she pleases and then does what she has to do to cover it up. We understand that her inappropriate involvement with young women befits a malicious pattern: Field indicates in his screenplay that Lydia and her young assistant, Francesca, share “the tension of people who have at times slept together, but no longer do.” Later, in a heated encounter with Sebastian wherein Lydia suggests he step down from his position, he concedes a ubiquitous observation of Lydia’s myriad abuses of power: “Just because no one dares breathe it, we know the things you do! The little favors you grant.” Even her own wife, Sharon, a member of the orchestra herself, willfully ignores Lydia’s misbehavior: “There are many things I accept about you, and in the end I’m sure I could get over something like this”.

And, of course, there is the matter of Krista Taylor, the case which ultimately incites Lydia’s fall from grace. Although the precise details of Krista and Lydia’s involvement are never delineated, the evidence of misconduct is made clear by Lydia’s vehement denial, a denial which includes erasing any and all traces of communication between the two in the wake of Krista’s suicide. Lydia’s efforts are unsuccessful, though; she is still called for deposition, still the subject of a scathing New York Post exposé, still removed from her post as conductor. This is the one thing she cannot outrun.

It is difficult, to say the least, to capture every nuance and intricacy in the film in the scope of a mere article. There are certain idiosyncrasies in the story which merit their own independent articles, moments of indication which flower and expand and become their own beasts entirely. But it is these layers that render Tár so captivating; the film does not and cannot exist without the myriad interpretations it engenders. Throughout the film, Lydia tries and fails time and time again to rewrite the way things go, to devise her own truth and impose it upon everyone around her. Tár depends on its ambiguity, or rather, one’s willingness to make sense of the ambiguity.