Edgar Cochran ✝️’s review published on Letterboxd:
On a surface level, how would you describe Lydia Tár as an artist?
Is she a genius, overrated, sophisticated, talented, average, outstanding or subpar? Is there enough information to make a fair assessment about her talent within the film’s world?
Todd Field left me waiting more than 15 years for a next feature since I was left perplexed by the shockingly intimate moments of the suburban dystopia of Little Children (2005) at the expense of half-cooked development of serious thematic material: carnal, extramarital, spiritual, social... This comes next, and more than a revelation to prove how Blanchett is wondrously multifaceted and also the best actress of the year, she is aware about her role as much as her previous most relevant ones: separating art and artist is something that has become imperative for today’s society to implement as a conscious exercise, and one that society (common watchers, cinephiles, bibliophiles, music students and critics, etc.) still fail miserably to do so.
Rarely do I decide to focus on a scene during the development of a review, but there is a core scene that unfolds the rest of the axiomatic rules (whether you accept it or not) that must be applied to art appreciation. An extremely immature and insecure student, equally nervous and with inner turmoil, expresses the typical exhausting agenda that youth today immediately reveals as a nonsensical self-defense card for dismissing art based on the artists life:
“As a BIPOC pangender, I have difficulty connecting with Bach.”
I died inside with this phrase, but also cheered that a film acknowledged how people are dismissing the objective components that constitute art just because “someone made it”. This masterful scene, shot in a single take with a dynamism that Hollywood is terrified to offer to an executive studio to be approved due to “pacing issues”, escalates exceptionally with Lydia’s correct demolishing of such blind statement, obliterating this biased and toxic approach:
Among top 5 phrases of the film voted by many users in IMDb and outside of it, the following four belong to Lydia and occur in the same scene:
“You want to dance the mask, you must service the composer. You gotta sublimate yourself, your ego, and, yes, your identity. You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself.”
“The problem with enrolling yourself as an ultrasonic epistemic dissident is that if Bach's talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality, and so on, then so can yours. Now, some day, Max, when you go out into the world, and you guest conduct for a major or minor orchestra, you may notice that the players have more than light bulbs and music on their stands. They will also have been handed rating sheets - the purpose of which is to rate you. Now, what kind of criteria would you hope that they use to do this? Your score reading and stick technique, or something else?”
“It is always the question that involves the listener, it's never the answer.”
Also, as a honorable mention, this is genius:
“Unfortunately, the architect of your soul appears to be social media.”
Confronted with these truths, the student confirms his insecurities and lack of artistic maturity:
“You're a fucking bitch.”
I even feel conflicted with quoting this as they are curse words, but I don’t believe in censorship with it comes to addressing art, such as this film. However, that’s the normal IQ response you will get from the average IQ of a YouTube comment section, ot a Twitch reply. Indeed, his formation is the language of social media.
Now let’s take the student’s side: He is in front of an eminence in music, Lydia, who has given the Berlin Philarmonic the “priviledge” of teaching to aspiring students the sublimation of oneself to art, even as a lesbian woman, in front of the music of a Christian music legend. Bach’s devoted life to God is well documented, and his pieces were dedicated to God and to emulate passages of the Bible. Today, many people will find this troubling to the extent to which they understand true Biblical Christianity. And that doesn’t matter at all when one must study his pieces. Bach has become the common trunk for the majority of prestigious music careers and programs all around the world due to his musical structure and tempo. When assessing music, does the life of Bach matter?
No.
The recent “Howards Legacy incident” where people streaming / promoting it are being targeted by people and are getting their streams / posts reported as anti-LGBT is beyond insane. The argument is that they are “putting money in the pocket of an anti-LGBT author”, dismissing, in a mindless logic, the work of hundreds of other people involved in that work. Today, one lives under the danger of being labelled by people that do not know you at all because you support a particular art piece. If Chaplin was a woman abuser, why are his films heralded as masterpieces? If Polanski is a rapist and a fugitive from justice, why are his films considered worldwide as some of the best in cinema and conquer several favorites lists? One of the most famous reviews of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) finds it a hard time to rate the film half a star because it is a piece of that person’s memory, despite labelling it as “violently transphobic”. The same user gave Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) half a star because the man vomits during a pivotal scene.
Is this fair? Why are people assuming personality traits and even freaking ideologies you supposedly possess based on a film you promote? Why does admiring and promoting Birth of a Nation (1915) labels you as a “person that dismisses history”, “man that negates the human tragedy it ensued”, “racist” or “KKK supporter”, but admiring Repulsion (1965), Chinatown (1975) or Rosemary’s Baby (1968) doesn’t make me a rapist. Giving a 100/100 rating to Saló has indeed people comment to have the opinion that I am a child molester, “as Pasolini was”. People selectively choose who to disregard, based on their convenient preferences.
However, going deeper, it all comes down to this: Can we judge people? Are we the jurors of the world, or of humanity itself? Do we really know what is just, and good? Isn’t it a fact that moral standards vary around the world based on culture, religion, inclinations, and the political climate and adopted perspectives? Can we keep track of the emotional catharsis of every single artist that we have decided to condemn, even if this crime was committed decades ago? Can we really read the soul?
No.
None of this has a say in artistic evaluation. Art speaks differently to each soul. “A single book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books”. Tarkovsky’s wisdom is unjustifiably invalidated when a group of people decide to “not to watch a Jodorowsky film ever again” because of the backstage tragedies during the shooting of El Topo (1970); the same thing applies for Bettolucci’s most exquisitely crafted and directed poetry Last Tango in Paris (1972).
I wish I could live in a world where none of these films existed; instead, I do live in a world where they exist, and they are celluloid masterpieces.
Back to the student, when he expresses Bach doesn’t suit his own agenda, Lydia immediately attacks like a crocodile and publicly humiliates him with truths through the abuse of “academic” power, challenging him to reflect on what constitutes his frame of thought. She never had a reason to expose him as an object of ridicule, to call him a robot (even if he is), and to even touch his leg. The film pays a lot of attention to the physical language implications, an observation degree that we rarely see treated in films.
The cinematography is beyond spectacular, static and dynamic, conquering wide and intimate spaces for the intended effect of intimacy or hysteria, to evoke a feeling of comfort zones or literal exotic lands abroad, and continuously challenges all of those “renowned figures in the industry” that have used their status to physically, emotionally and sexually take advantage of youth to keep their status. Their position becomes their personal idol; remove that position of power, and you strip them from their only goal in life. It’s a desperate sign to live like this, and Blanchett personifies this abusive monster with the highest class of acting, a sensuous German-language dominion, a chameleonic character which perceptions of the five senses begin to distort her capacity to identify life from fears or dreams, including the gorgeous nod to Stalker (1979) with the dog scene.
No kingdom is permanent, and even the Roman Empire fell. Also, every kingdom has its weaknesses. When Lydia identifies her next target, she finds herself hopelessly attached to the decisions, movements, words, and actions of her new object of interest, as she sees it.
Human legal trials are also shown to be futile, as they don’t even have the capacity to distinguish an authentic recording vs. an obviously edited one, and I was a victim of this as well at some point: defamation is one of the worst experiences you can go through, as it is a humiliating and unfair extermination of your career, and the position will probably be replaced by someone that doesn’t necessarily have a cleaner background than the former. This further proves that people are completely incapable of being judges and jurors of others, and that evidence can be manipulated.
As a character study that uses the asphyxiating demands of “character” made by philharmonic orchestras to admit the best talent, this is a juggernaut triumph, one that obfuscates the mediocrity of an “Elvis” or “Queen” biopic, one that delves into the real problems that all art industries are facing today, both internally (the predator wolfs using talent to maintain their position at any cost), and externally (those that cannot separate art from artist). From this perspective, both are villainous in their own way.
As a final note, the ending scene proves that audiences DO attend to art events, be it a musical event or another one that may apply, based on the content they know, and not necessarily the artist itself, which just accentuates the whole argument of the film. This is a genius scene, and the film is a rare masterpiece.
96/100
