Not Another Tár Review

Author’s Note: It was impossible to parse my thoughts about this film without getting deep into the plot, so major spoilers ahead.

From the moment the film begins, you have a sense that Tár will be a perpetually playful subversion of expectations. Perhaps nothing sets the viewer up for this more than the film’s opening credits sequence where the typical hierarchy of the film’s production flashes on screen in reverse chronological order, beginning with special thanks to shooting locations, catering, and copyright logos and ending with the main cast. This is going to be a familiar story about power, but director Todd Fields has no intention of letting it unfold in a predictable way, choosing instead to embrace an awkward, frustrating, terrifying, and sometimes absurdly funny messiness. For a movie with such grim subject matter, I didn’t expect to laugh as much as I did.

I’ll admit, I was one of those people who fully believed that Lydia Tár was a real person when I first saw the biopic-style trailer. Even now, over a month after its release, when you try to look up anything about the movie, something along the lines of “is lydia tar a real person?” will always be in the search bar’s autocomplete. There’s a few…