TÁR, the cancel culture conversation piece of the year starring Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss and directed by Todd Field

Also don't think these were just bad job references, she was going out of her way to contact people who were thinking of working with Krista.

are we talking about culpability from the viewer's perspective or from the perspective of the public in the world of TAR?

xp or that she thinks the weather has changed enough that her identity will not save her in the current cultural environment

or that she simply doesn't want to get involved in a bad situation that she wasn't really responsible for; those emails weren't (again to the best of my memory) conversations so much as they were one-way demands for better treatment

yeah, the questions of what the viewer brings to the table and how people are artificially reacting within the playpen of the film seems to color a lot of perspective both in and out.

I know i keep beating this horse but there's no clearcut answers here because the director is intentionally gaming these systems.

think we need a screenshot of the emails, cannot find one right now

the director is "intentionally gaming these systems" because in actual cases of people taking advantage of power dynamics (e.g. #metoo) there is rarely physical proof of the abuses - it's based on testimony and hearsay and reputation. tar isn't going to get nailed by the emails, she's going to get nailed by the people whom she has harmed deciding to speak out

xp i can do that, hang on.

didn't she get nailed by her assistant leaking the emails? or is that just implied?

i.e. he is not gaming the system, he's reflecting the ambiguity that always exists in these cases

lol no one remembers what happened in this movie apparently

I know some of the discourse is "this is how successful people/women need to act, it's a very competitive world" but think even if true, this doesn't lessen the guilt, but expands it to the whole culture.

http://i.imgur.com/Ar7TxEV.jpg

he's reflecting the ambiguity that always exists in these cases

http://i.imgur.com/zFFkafP.jpg
this is clearly a cry for help to Francesca but beyond that is this a person who you would write a placement recommendation for?

can't see the images for some reason

there are two sets of emails shown - Tar's career sabotage emails and Krista's desperate emails - I've been talking about the former.

http://i.imgur.com/Ar7TxEV.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zFFkafP.jpg

Here's the "sabotage" emails, which really just boil down to her saying that Krista is "strange and troubled". it's vague stuff and pretty shitty but they're responses for a recommendation, which she can't give.
https://i.imgur.com/B6BirX6.png
http://i.imgur.com/B6BirX6.png

you can see at the bottom some which are not references but just speculative non-recommendations

i need to rewatch this film to be sure but the extent of Tar's genuine culpability seems entirely up in the air? until her break with reality, I don't remember her actually DOING anything actionable on camera, excepting threatening a kid who is threatening her kid and who among us wouldn't etc etc. the film does a lot with "it's the implication" to the extent that her guilt feels ironclad but being a dick isn't a fireable offense is it? tho, tbh, i think even entertaining this line of thinking falls under the heading of useless discourse and plays into the provocation of the tar pit

― POLIZISTEN VERSINKEN IM SCHLAMM (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, January 31, 2023 3:34 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

her conduct wrt krista was pretty well spelled out even if it wasn’t shown explicitly on camera — the emails, her dreams, and then the evidence of patterns of abuse with the way it seemed like she was similarly grooming her assistant, her relationship with the cellist…even the fact that the first violin was her wife — and was extremely firable, no? lydia certainly seemed to think so, which is why she went to such lengths to keep the details of the relationship and its aftermath under wraps. and it is imo exactly this method of character study that the film does so well and lends the film its heft and tension, although it seems like for some the lack of overwhelming moral clarity of not like, having lydia break the fourth wall and tell the camera “I’m bad btw” that some, um, very literal-minded viewers seem to have struggled with

v much a second-hand otm! you thought *I* was otm lol

"you would just like to point out that I have been otm in this thread"

xp i dunno man, those all look like responses to requests for recommendation to me but i think we're approaching this from different angles and degrees of necessity for clarity. Those email sequences appear for fractions of seconds on the screen!

the emails, her dreams, and then the evidence of patterns of abuse with the way it seemed like she was similarly grooming her assistant, her relationship with the cellist…even the fact that the first violin was her wife — and was extremely firable, no?

i'm not struggling with the film, my responses to it or what its intentions and implications are. but it's fun to play with the puzzle a bit.

yeah, the questions of what the viewer brings to the table and how people are artificially reacting within the playpen of the film seems to color a lot of perspective both in and out.

I know i keep beating this horse but there's no clearcut answers here because the director is intentionally gaming these systems.

― POLIZISTEN VERSINKEN IM SCHLAMM (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, January 31, 2023 4:16 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

for sure, there is a lot about how this is done — even having the main character be a gay woman — that is subversive/mischievous/clever (depending on one’s perspective and expectations). but think the way the film forces a viewer to sit with these contradictions — how it doesn’t prove her culpability beyond a reasonable doubt, the way it chooses its protagonist to subvert our expectations of what an otherwise-easily demonizable abuser looks like, that gives it part of its power

Yes

I think Todd Field was trying to create a scenario where it's clear that "Lydia is bad" but it's not clear as to "how bad she is".

The most concrete example of Lydia's "badness" in the film comes in the form of that Juilliard lecture. It's the only real moment we see "how Lydia is shitty to younger people" on actual, concrete display. We also see this very real shitty moment transformed by somebody in the class from "something bad that happened" into "something worse that didn't happen", via the video supercut. I thought this was important when we begin to examine Lydia's purported sexual misconduct.

I didn't see, int he film, any actual concrete evidence that Lydia had any sexual relationship with either Francesca or Krista at all. We don't hear any survivor testimony, we don't see anything revealed in the deposition aside from the revelation that Francesca colluded and Lydia lied, It's implied that it's likely the case? but the viewer has to make a leap of assumption to conclude that it is the case. I thought this was a deliberate choice by Todd Field.

I read the script and noticed that there was a line removed from the final film. Francesca and Lydia are discussing Krista, and Francesca expresses surprise that Krista has gone off the rails as she has, saying, "she seemed so fine when the three of us took that trip to (someplace that sounded like a Caribbean destination spot)". I noticed when I read that line that it effectively confirmed that Lydia DID had an inappropriate relationship with both Francesca and Krista, and that it was never so concretely defined in the finished film, and that it seemed as if Field was deliberately removing concrete evidence of the extent of Lydia's guilt for a reason.

I think the reason is pretty plain, too. Field wanted to create a film where we as an audience were being put in a similar position as the individuals surrounding Lydia in the film. We had impressions but no real evidence, and we are forced to draw some conclusions, and so we do so... and find ourselves assuming that Lydia has, at the very least, "behaved inappropriately", and find ourselves also speculating beyond that.

@ k3vin, I agree. I believe that if this movie were to be written with Lydia's character being "a man" it effectively then becomes a movie about "maleness". That Lydia was "a woman" was not a comment on womanhood, there is no "women can be abusers, too!" thesis. Lydia being "a woman" made the movie more specifically about What It Was Actually About, freed from any tether to the well-trodden (both in reality and in fiction) narratives about abusive men. Lydia being "not male" removed a gel from the spotlight to examine a different thing, here.

Lydia's gender even itself seems to be obfuscated at several points. The most obvious example is when Lydia describes herself as Petra's "Vater"; also, Lydia's expressed desire to make her all-female mentorship programme "all-gender"; claiming to Gopnik that neither she nor Marin Alsop faced any gender-specific hardships; and so forth. Lydia was written as a woman (a gay woman) not to make the film about "women", but to make it "not about men" (or heterosexuals, at that.)

Hmm:

John Waters could have made Tar a masterpiece. The movie wants to badly to be camp but is straitjacketed by all the highbrow signifiers

— David Adjmi (@dadjmi) February 2, 2023

John Waters could make any movie into a masterpiece … so what?

(Any movie except A Dirty Shame, that is)

yeah that's silly
"this delicious filet mignon would make a better steak sandwich, zero stars"

forks otm

Francesca and Lydia are discussing Krista, and Francesca expresses surprise that Krista has gone off the rails as she has, saying, "she seemed so fine when the three of us took that trip to (someplace that sounded like a Caribbean destination spot)".

there is a version of this line in the film. i thought the destination was wherever in south america she was doing ethnomusicology but that could have been a leap by me.

good posts from fgti btw, calmly and clearly going into better detail than i am

Yep, fgti gets my vote in this thread

at a TÁR talk at the Academy Museum and Cate Blanchett just said that her favorite music of all time is Einstürzende Neubauten

— Michael Idov 🌻 (@michaelidov) February 14, 2023

Wow, kudos to Cate for it turns out underplaying Lydia Tar

We are all Tar babies now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/arts/dance/goecke-dog-feces-critic.html

wow you just can't do or say anything these days

she can't compose. another looming anxiety: what's the point of being a self-created solipsistic ubermensch if you still need mahler?

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, January 31, 2023 9:46 AM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

you say this of the woman who wrote "apartment for sale"???

lol perhaps a sign of creative rebirth

Having watched it again, I thought of Otto Preminger, whose best films insist on an open-endedness; the viewer feels, after Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Bonjour Tristesse, etc. have ended, as if they've seen prosecution and defense present cases to a jury. After this second viewing I don't know how I'm supposed to respond to her. She's talented, can speak about her craft in a self-regarding upper-middlebrow manner to Adam Gopnik types, and who may or may not have driven a young woman to kill herself.

Is it possible you’re not ”supposed to” think of his character in a particular way?

This character, not his character (sorry)

the zadie smith piece repeatedly calls her an "art monster," which definitely jibes with all three of alfred's observations

Good points Alfred. I still don’t know if TÁR is exactly one for the ages but it’s hard to think of many other firmly mainstream American movies lately that have been this comfortable in ambiguities, ironies, and in general treating audiences like sentient beings.

About that ending: I'll acknowledge I can be wrong, but I concluded that based on her manner Lydia doesn't regard playing before her new Filipino clients as a step down. She's as cheerlessly, ruthlessly intense as if in front of Julliard kids.

She’s definitely putting in the work … arguably returning to the most pure form of her work (no tossing around Deutsche Grammophon vinyl covers for inspiration)

As a filipino I have the final say on TÁR's ending and the racist undertones are v much the point. This white girl got her start doing ethnomusicography w/ indigenous Peruvians, got caught doing sex crimes in Europe, and will now start over again in another "lesser than" country

— carol grant (@carolaverygrant) March 7, 2023

trying desperately to underhand this person’s point

i'm just trying to understand what underhand means