![]() ![]() “My kids are constantly saying to me how restless I am and how I need to sit still. Louis Vuitton leather jacket, £4,750, silk/cotton shirt, £1,460, cotton corduroy and leather trousers, £1,740, and wool/silk tie, £200 © Julia NoniĪll of which begs the question: what has she been on the run from? A vast pause. Yet to call it a lesbian #MeToo movie, or an indictment of the patriarchal classical music scene, would be to severely misread it. We see Lydia promote and dismiss colleagues, teach and argue with students, ponder the nature and needs of art – and try to ignore the manic emails of a former protégée she has form, it seems, in blurred relationships with female acolytes. More bluntly, though, Tár is about someone reaching the top and realising they’ve come horribly close to the edge. It doesn’t happen very often.” Part of preparing for the role involved her conducting full orchestras in certain scenes. “It’s a completely different way of viewing the world through sound – and to play someone who has such an acute sensitivity to sound.” So, who better to play a genius?”įaced with all this, Blanchett struggles to discuss Tár: “I don’t think I’ve quite processed it, to be honest. Instead, the meeting left Field with “the impression of an individual operating at the pitch of perception, someone who possessed the kind of wit and intelligence one rarely, if ever, encounters. The two had met several years ago with an eye to collaborating on a film Field had written with Joan Didion, but nothing came of it. Of course, she didn’t know that,” says the maker of Little Children, who has been absent from our screens for 16 years. Todd Field confirms this when asked if he wrote it with her in mind. She shares her British home (and others across the world) with him, their three sons and daughter, and her mother.Īrtistic with a capital “A”, ambitious, elusive, refusing easy definitions but eye-wateringly committed, the performance arguably sums up the actress herself. A theatre actress by training, she has starred in a slew of ambitious stage productions as well, not least when she co-ran the Sydney Theatre Company with her husband, Andrew Upton. Disclaimer will add to a lengthy list of achievements, including Oscar-winning turns in Blue Jasmine and The Aviator, two Oscar-nominated takes on Elizabeth I, roles in other films such as Carol, Hanna and The Lord of the Rings, plus TV series like Stateless or Mrs America. At her feet, alternately snoozing and scratching, are her three dogs Doug, Polly and Fletcher, who mostly behave themselves (although “they’ll start farting in a minute”, she warns, “and we’ll really be in trouble”). Luckily, she’s smiling.īlanchett, 53, is home after a long day spent filming her latest project, Disclaimer, a new thriller series for Apple TV directed by Alfonso Cuarón. The surroundings are very dark, and more to the point, she is wearing black, pointed, thick-rimmed glasses that make the actress, one of Hollywood’s most beautiful women, look like she’s auditioning for a highbrow reboot of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. It could be that Todd Field has fallen under the spell of the maestro himself, Austrian director Michael Haneke, with these ideas about surveillance, the return of the repressed and the tyranny and cruelty in the bürgerliche European classical music tradition.For her next role, Cate Blanchett is… “Oh God,” cries the Australian actress, “I look like a vampire! I look like I’m about to play the organ!” She is sitting late one night in the study of her home in the English countryside, and it’s true, the mood is gothic with a touch of eco-spiritual, with two small owl totems looming behind her. And the music itself, so far from being an emollient, amplifies the violence just beneath the surface. Tár threatens a little girl at her daughter’s school that she hears is a bully. There are strange sounds, intrusions and things out of place. We know from the outset that she is effectively being spied on. Meanwhile, her guest masterclass at Juilliard goes horribly sour when a young student, identifying as BIPOC pangender, presumes to dismiss Bach on ideological grounds and Tár humiliates this young Gen Z.Īnd all the time, Tár suspects that there is something wrong: she is twitchy, paranoid and insomniac. Her assistant, played by Noémie Merlant (another would-be conductor) appears to be someone else she is keeping on an emotional string and she is being stalked by another former mentee who has become obsessed with her Tár has furthermore conceived a tendresse for the new Russian cellist. She runs a mentoring scholarship programme for women, administered by a tiresome, oleaginous would-be conductor, played by Mark Strong, and there are rumours that this is a source of young women with whom Tár has affairs. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |