BATON CHARGE “Tár.”

THE CURRENT CINEMA

- ANTHONY LANE

What do you mean, you’ve never heard of Lydia Tár? Come on, you must know her. She was a protégée of Bernstein’s. She’s the one who conducted orchestras in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York before taking charge of the Berlin Philharmonic. She has a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy—the royal flush of accolades. It’s true that she happens to be a fictional character, incarnated by Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s new movie, “Tár,” but that is a footling detail. This woman is alive, ominously articulate, crisply styled, and all too present. She burns like a cool flame.

When we first meet Lydia, she’s about to be interviewed onstage, in New York, by my colleague Adam Gopnik, who is persuasively played, in an audacious stroke of casting, by himself. (One presumes that Robert Pattinson was unavailable.) Questioned about her art, Lydia launches into an impassioned riff on the nature of musical time; asked about gender, she names various trailblazers who took to the podium before her but seems otherwise unconcerned with couching her achievement in strictly feminist terms. Her trail is her own.