Broadcast on CANAL+ on August 29 and available on myCANAL, Tár is one of the great successes of the start of 2023. Cate Blanchett virtuously embodies a genius, troubled and passionate conductor. A character inspired by reality?
Cate Blanchett’s incredible score
Released in January 2023 and quickly rising to the top in the hearts of viewers and the profession, Tár is already available on myCANAL. In this feature film by Todd Field (Little Children), Cate Blanchett impresses in the costume of Lydia Tár, a conductor who no longer has anything to prove of her art and her talent.
As the launch of her book approaches and she prepares a highly anticipated concerto, her life will fall apart in a few weeks, as mysteriously as brutally.
Crowned with the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, the Golden Globe and the 2023 BAFTA for Best Actress, the actress deploys here the full extent of her acting palette in this complex and psychological role, and fascinates us as much as it questions us.
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“She’s a real autodidact and she accomplished in one year, by shooting two other films, I repeat, more than Lydia Tár would have done in 25 years, explains Todd Field about the one for whom he wrote his film. The filming came, she did not sleep anymore. After a day’s work, she rushed to a lesson in piano, German, American accent, stick holding, beating time.“
Lydia Tar: Fiction or Reality?
But then a question arises when we look at Tár: does this character of a passionate, adored, authoritarian and toxic conductor really exist? Maestra hailed throughout the world, the American Marin Aslop has in any case found an echo between this portrait and her life.
“When I first heard about this movie at the end of August, I was shocked because I didn’t know about it. There are so many elements that are aligned with my own life”, she had launched to the Sunday Times.
A resemblance that is far from having satisfied her, she who had castigated the fact that in “as a woman, as a leader, as a lesbian (…) to have the opportunity to talk about a woman in this role and to make her an aggressor, it broke my heart.” If some have indeed pointed out some commonalities between the two women, Cate Blanchett wanted to silence the rumors by denying any connection with reality.
CANAL+
“I didn’t base the character of Lydia Tár on anyone in particular. I thought as much of the American essayist and activist Susan Sontag as a public intellectual, as of the composer Alma Mahler. This film is above all an examination of the corrupting nature of institutional power. It affects everyone, regardless of your sexual orientation or gender“, she had clarified at ClassicFM.
Finding her roots in reality anyway, because born after interviews between the director and several musicians recounting their experiences, Lydia Tár will leave you speechless and haunt you in this feature film which does not suffer from any false note. . To see and review without further delay, on myCANAL.