I Am Breaking My Silence on TÁR

and also Decision to Leave, Aftersun

Watching

TÁR (2022)

Todd Field’s first film in 16 years opens with the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik playacting himself onstage with Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), a fictional, world-renowned composer/conductor preparing to record Mahler’s Fifth with the Berlin Philharmonic. Blanchett, as game as she’s ever been, prattles on about her field and work with studied erudition for some ten to fifteen minutes, dutifully name-checking a few other women conductors just to clear the air of the competition. Field’s attention to minutia together with Blanchett’s commitment to the bit have fooled more than one viewer into mistaking Tár for a real person and the movie for a reenactment of a real fall from power. Her bespoke suits have gotten plenty of attention—releasing this movie right before Halloween was a marketing masterstroke—though I’m still waiting to hear more about Tár’s multiple Architectural Digest–ready European apartments.

Many have called TÁR a cancel culture movie, honing in on the consequences of a specific scene near the start where Tár, leading a masterclass at Juilliard, schools a queer student of color about Bach with an arrogance that would be out of line for a teacher even when they’re right (which I think she mostly is). Two hours downstream of this incident, which is filmed in the movie’s only truly virtuosic single take, Tár gets called in to explain herself in the face of a viral video of her classroom behavior, chopped up in editing to be maximally damning. Tár points out the obvious (it’s all taken out of context) but by this point in her career it doesn’t matter: treating a student rudely is only the latest in a lifetime full of bad behaviors—including but not limited to the gaslighting of her partner Sharon (Nina Hoss, patiently holding up a violin on one shoulder and the mystery of their relationship on the other)—that have been hitherto swept under the rug.

Saying that TÁR is about cancel culture might get the trajectory of Tár’s arc right but it fails to accurately assess what the movie is most interested in. The initial, opaque synopsis released with the film’s teaser trailer called it a movie that “examines the changing nature of power, its impact and durability in our modern world.” I think whoever wrote that got it exactly right for once. What makes up most of the movie’s runtime is a long game Tár plays with a young cellist (Sophie Kauer, an actual cellist) who she has the hots for, and how this latest episode of leveraging her position to play favorites compares with Tár’s other relationships with women—Sharon, who was presumptively once in a similar position; Tár’s assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant), herself an aspiring conductor; the ghost (mostly figurative) of a previous protégée. The awful ambiguity of the situation is familiar enough to provoke self-reflection on how power operates in your own life (whether you’ve held it or had it held over you). Yet the world of TÁR is so far removed from the casual viewer’s everyday experience that it has the didactic force of science fiction.

In what might be Field’s only misstep, the movie ends by making that genre subtext more explicit at the expense of the southeast Asian clime where a disgraced Tár is sent to live out the rest of her days. Call me a crank but there must be a less racially questionable way of exiling a practically alien outcast than by banishing her to conduct before an auditorium of one thousand Asian extras literally dressed up as aliens. Surely Lydia Tár, Garbage Collector would have sufficed.

Decision to Leave (2022)

Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave takes its place in a long line of sexy detective thrillers, which makes it a bit of a departure from his usual fare of thrilling sex and violence. In a viral clip of his introduction to the film at New York Film Festival, Park warned the audience that Decision to Leave would be light on all the titillation he’s made his name on, but more generous with the laughs for once, as though laughter wasn’t already the typical response to the more lurid moments of his schlockier films.

Detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) works weekdays in Busan and spends the weekends with his wife outside the city, where she works at a nuclear reactor. They’re making things work but there’s some obvious strain on this “weekend marriage,” including a long bout of insomnia that Hae-joon can’t get over. During the investigation of a death uncertainly ruled a hiking accident, Hae-joon is drawn toward the deceased’s widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei), first as a potential suspect and then as a romantic interest—though he won’t admit it to himself. Seo-rae is Chinese by descent and frequently apologizes for her poor Korean. She bridges the language gap by frequent recourse to her phone’s translate app and serially, some might even say sociopathically, leaves voice memos for Hae-joon to eventually discover as his interest in her turns more and more into an obsession. The two go on a series of plausible deniabilidates—he cooks her Chinese food (she chides him for getting the flavors wrong), they have a little temple meet-cute, he grills her in the investigation room over the kind of high-quality sushi you only order for someone you’re trying to impress—until the discovery of new evidence snaps Hae-joon back to his initial search for justice. They part ways, only for a second murder to improbably reunite them a year later.

Decision to Leave is low in shock value but proportionally high in creativity. It’s never a boring film, even when it relies on phone-based communications to move the plot along, which is often. You can very easily picture a version of this story set in the 1980s, which would have obviated the need to work around cell phones. Instead Park greets the challenge with good humor, identifying new uses for the pedometer app and nailing the particular ways that the medium of iMessages can make for good drama, right down to the dreaded “…”. Like his other films, there are too many weird little contrivances (this time including a plastic baggie of five fentanyl capsules on the underside of the lid of an urn of a character’s father’s ashes). Unlike his best work, which tends to stick the landing memorably if grotesquely, here he holds the ending 30 seconds past its due. Unsure whether he’s going for cold cynicism or romantic tragedy, Park, like so many burned-out text-message romantics, lets his story trail off with a whimper in lieu of closing with confident finality.

Aftersun (2022)

Something seems to be missing from the beginning of Scottish director Charlotte Wells’s debut feature. What you can gather by the end: 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) takes a vacation in Turkey with her dad Calum (Paul Mescal); Calum and Sophie’s mom (unseen) are recently divorced and Calum has been taking things rather hard, turning to Tai chi and various books of poetry to self-soothe; Sophie records much of their vacation on one of those early-90s consumer-grade camcorders and at some point in the future rewatches the tape as a young adult with a wife (?) and child (??) of her own.

Wells’s filmmaking style leaves lots of details for the viewer to figure out on their own. Normally this might be a virtue—adult dramas that handhold you too tightly can be a nuisance to sit through—but here the movie skips past giving you a narrative hook and hopes you’ll be intrigued by the visual palette that alternates between precise compositions shot on film and messy, digital detritus. I saw one review claim that you can tell in an early shot that you are watching adult Sophie watching her childhood home videos, but if so this was entirely lost on me. The same review says this is a movie about the last time Sophie saw her dad (is this a line that is spoken in the movie? adult Sophie doesn’t actually appear in full until over an hour in, and only for a few seconds) and more reasonably claims that the whole movie is inspired by something from the director’s life. This being a first film and all, I can see how that would be the case, but in general I wonder if the movie’s biggest fans are reading into the film things that it doesn’t actually tell us.

I can’t imagine most people are really very interested in such a small, aesthetically and narratively oblique family drama even when A24 is marketing it, so I’m chalking up the nearly sold-out crowd at my screening to the bargain Tuesday $7 movie tickets and the allure of Paul Mescal. I’ve never seen a Normal Person myself but I’ll admit he was the film’s clear standout. Mescal, 26, plays a man (31) older than me (29) more convincingly than I probably could. He and Corio make a good team, he’s got the self-deprecations of dadhood on lock, he even pulls off a moving Big Cry when the time is right. Yet for someone who is supposed to be a bit haggard after his divorce and separation from his daughter, he isn’t really looking all the worse for wear. Much like there’s a joke about how Dakota Johnson doesn’t quite work in period pieces because her face looks like it knows what cell phones are, not even era-appropriate baggy clothes can hide that Mescal has the body of a man who’s done CrossFit.