Cate Blanchett

The film follows the complicated genius conductor of a German orchestra, Lydia Tar, at the height of her career as it all begins to unravel.

But it’s a meditation on power and power is genderless.” So there’s no right or wrong responses to works of art. So there's no right or wrong responses to works of art

After watching 53-year-old Blanchett's portrayal of iconic German conductor Lydia Tár, American conductor Marin Alsop said she'd been 'offended'. Alsop, 66, ...

[The Oscar-winner](https://metro.co.uk/2014/03/04/cate-blanchett-celebrated-oscar-win-by-treating-husband-to-threesome-4409537/) was in [London](https://metro.co.uk/tag/london/?ico=auto_link_entertainment_P2_LNK1) last night for the film’s premiere (wearing a dreamy metallic gown, no less) and shared her thoughts on negative reviews while in the capital. So there’s no right or wrong responses to works of art. [Golden Globes](https://metro.co.uk/tag/golden-globes/) in favour of the UK premiere. It’s about women as leaders in our society.’ For me that was heartbreaking,’ Alsop said. [Dancing On Ice’s Michelle Heaton reveals she has whiplash after falling over four times in one day: ‘I forget I’m on ice’](https://metro.co.uk/2023/01/12/dancing-on-ice-2023-michelle-heaton-reveals-whiplash-injury-18088203/?ico=more_text_links) She went on: ‘It is a meditation on power and the corrupting nature of power and I think that that doesn’t necessarily happen only in cultural circles […] she could just as well have been a master architect or the head of a major banking corporation. [Nightmare Alley](https://metro.co.uk/2022/01/13/nightmare-alley-review-bradley-cooper-and-cate-blanchett-shine-15912536/) star went on: ‘And it’s a very provocative film and it will elicit a lot of very strong responses for people. ‘I don’t think you could have talked about the corrupting nature of power in as nuanced away as Todd Field has done as a filmmaker if there was a male at the centre of it because we understand so absolutely what that looks like. ‘It’s not a film about conducting, and I think that the circumstances of the character are entirely fictitious. [Cate Blanchett](https://metro.co.uk/tag/cate-blanchett/) has responded to criticism calling her [new film Tár](https://metro.co.uk/2023/01/11/cate-blanchett-believes-most-powerful-thing-to-say-is-i-dont-know-18073040/) ‘offensive’. She’s a trailblazer of a musician and a conductor.’

Riveting: Tár reviewed on The Spectator Australia | Todd Field's Tár stars an insanely glorious Cate Blanchett – if she doesn't win an Oscar I'll eat my ...

As for the ending, it’s not one of those films that just peters out without a resolution. Why does she keep seeing a recurring pattern? But has she won the argument? She has firm views about gender bias, telling him she has no wish to be called ‘maestra’ instead of ‘maestro’ because ‘we don’t call astronauts astronettes’ and as a woman in this industry ‘I have no complaints.’ Field wrote this for Blanchett, who commands every frame, as befits a character fully in command of her life, at least at the outset. Her wardrobe is exquisite: bespoke suits and expensive linen or cashmere in tasteful neutral colours.

Will a new generation of women on the podium perpetuate the tyrannical charisma of their male predecessors or overturn it?

It’s about a willingness to guide, not goad: to serve the composer’s score and invite musicians along on that discovery of interpretation. When the Chinese American conductor Xian Zhang next conducts the New York Philharmonic, she will raise her arms to an orchestra where women outnumber men by a margin of one (45 to 44) for the first time in its 180-year history. The immobility of the audience is as much a part of the conductor’s design as the obedience of the orchestra. The code of laws, in the form of the score, is in his hands. He She is raised on a rostrum high above the orchestra, and above the audience behind him her. Every detail of his public behaviour throws light on the nature of power.’ Canetti’s comments were made at a time when conductors were viewed as superstars: when maestri wielded their musical authority and physical wills with a commanding and sometimes autocratic rod, and the audience’s attention shifted from the music to the conductor. The French conductor Claire Gibault – the founding director of La Maestra, a conducting competition for women, the founding director of the Paris Mozart Orchestra, and the first woman to conduct the Filarmonica della Scala in Milan – arrived at the Paris Conservatory in 1966. During the Victorian era, sitting at a piano was acceptable because the silhouette of a woman’s back in the polite confines of the parlour or salon was considered titillating for the male audience. The role and the increasing power of the conductor’s status evolved because orchestras grew in size: 100 musicians needed to be controlled. In the 1930s, the French composer Nadia Boulanger became the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the London Philharmonic. A work of facto-fiction about the demise of a conductor at the pinnacle of her career, Tár is instead based more closely on the real-life misconducts and misappropriations of power perpetrated by male conductors, such as Herbert von Karajan in the 1960s, and more recently by James Levine of the Metropolitan Opera in New York (who is hauntingly mentioned in the film). When the Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv was appointed musical director of the Teatro Comunale in Bologna this year, she became the first female musical director of an opera house in Italian history.

A protégé of Leonard Bernstein, lauded for her interpretations of Bach and Mahler, Lydia has landed the top job in classical music, and is now principal ...

Is she going mad, and is the affair she has with a balding fisherman real? We never find out, for Jenkins is more interested in exploring the faded echoes of a place’s past. M3GAN is a clever dystopian chiller and raises an interesting question — is all this smart technology making us stupider? But in Tár, Todd Field’s intense, intriguing drama, a woman has stormed the citadels of the symphony. In a scene you’ll either applaud or be horrified by, Lydia rocks up to her kid’s school, finds a girl who’s been bullying her and whispers: “I’ll get you.” Tár is full of such studied ambivalence.

Todd Field's film is essentially about our current moment, and all the whirlpools of discourse around #MeToo and “cancel culture”, but rarely in a way that ...

The allegations that come to light never materially exist beyond a one-sentence newspaper clipping, a suggestion that Lydia has “enticed and groomed young women” in her orchestra – a phrase too vague to pin down the severity of her actions. And within the cold, brutalist spaces of production designer Marco Bittner Rosser, there’s little escape from the full force of her undoing, either for the audience or for those in Lydia’s own orbit. But Lydia herself is so compellingly constructed, a perfect synthesis of hypocrisy and denial, that Field’s shortcuts never cost the film much of its nuance. Her talent is plain – she’s a protégée of Leonard Bernstein and is one of the few winners of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award – but she’s also cruel, manipulative, and abusive. It answers the question of “should we separate the art from the artist?” by laying bare how impossible a demand that is. It’s a performance that functions as a total culmination, the crystallised form of all the women Blanchett’s played in the past – from Elizabeth I to Lilith in Nightmare Alley – who act like they have total control but may actually be hollow on the inside.

Hallelujah, then, for Tár, with Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, American classical conductor and composer of vast global fame. It is brilliant, and it is singular.

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In conversation with Nina Hoss, the star of the Oscar-tipped Todd Field biopic Tár featuring Cate Blanchett.

That is fascinating and challenging in the best way, and I love a challenge. “Cate is a most fascinating actor and she immerses herself so much into whatever she takes on. But that’s why the end product is the way it is – because he is questioning and working on it until the very last moment. “In that way, he [Field] is incredibly smart but also tough on himself because he wrote these scenes, he shot these scenes and he loves these scenes. It’s about finding the most nuanced way of telling the story and that went through to the very final edit.” In the case of Tár , Hoss says, many scenes didn’t make the cut because they would have explained too much and narrowed the audience’s viewpoint.

Cate Blanchett has defended her new film Tár over claims that it is “anti-woman”. The 53-year-old actor won a Golden Globe award earlier this week for her ...

A cut above in terms of style, performance, and ideas, Todd Field's film about a celebrity conductor accused of sexual misconduct is essential cinema.

[But when sexual assault allegations against her are made public](https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/tar-cate-blanchett-film-drama-old-trope-predatory-lesbian-2069814?ico=in-line_link), her reputation as a prominent lesbian woman who supports younger women in the field is shattered. Her second-in-command (Allan Corduner) is worn out, her bullied assistant (Noémie Merlant) is quietly seething, and her live-in partner (the always brilliant Nina Hoss) is resentful. [Cate Blanchett](https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/cate-blanchett-dazzles-manifesto-arts-importance-104937?ico=in-line_link), is a maestro and an internationally lauded celebrity – a composer whose musical genius is unmatched and universally admired.