tár (w&d todd field)

It is the curious nature of having maintained this blog for over fifteen years that permits me to revisit my thoughts about a little seen film called In The Bedroom, by this director. I noted the film’s nuanced take on controversial material and its ‘none-too-likeable’ characters. It always takes courage to represent characters who are unsympathetic, and Field doubles down on this in his masterly new film, which has it nods to Haneke’s Piano Teacher and Weisse’s The Audition (which curiously also features Nina Hoss, with Blanchett’s role echoing that played by Hoss in that film). Put simply, this is an astonishingly assured film, one which is both highbrow and unafraid to use genre tropes when it needs to. It’s a film which manages to include a ten minute interview sequence discussing classical music, as well as dream sequences and at least one jump scare. There are so many elements in Tár that it feels as though it has no right to succeed (the strange neighbours, Bach’s progeny, an adopted daughter (from where?), but Blanchett’s performance and the filmmakers’ skills hold the whole thing together. The edit, by Monika Willi, who has frequently worked with Haneke, is superb, maintaining the pace, pulling out of scenes with the delicacy of a masterchef, and the sound design, (score by Hildur Guðnadóttir), so key in a film about a conductor, is exquisite. Perhaps on a second watch, vast crevasses might open up, but one suspects not. 

little children (d. todd field)

So what's this movie about then? At one point, Jennifer Connelly's character, who makes unspecified documentaries, interviews a child whose father has been killed in Baghdad. The child says something extremely profound which leads the workaholic Connelly to realise the value of her own family and she calls home in a frustrated attempt to speak to her neophyte house-husband Patrick Wilson.

This could be a conservative message as much as a liberal one. Family matters, blood is thicker than oil. The nominative liberal angle is the sympathetic take on the paedophile, McGovery. These days just to show a paedophile and not have him stoned to death is a badge of liberal conviction, and the clever exploration of his relationship with his mother establishes this movie as several degrees to the left of centre in its sensibility.

Probably. Because, again, the movie is about family. It is set in an anonymous, pseudo-Lynchian middle America, where mothers are bored and rich and fathers can see no reason not to indulge their desires, which have become no more than commodities. The two lead characters, Winslett and Wilson, would appear to be stepping into line by consumating their tender affair. Or perhaps Winslett is actually emulating Madame Bovary and asserting her feminine independence. They both appear to get away with their affair, the paedophile loses his penis, the bully his aggression, status quo returns to a chastened middle America.

It is part of the strength of this movie that these questions buzz around it like flies at the scene of another Bagdad bombing. It's perspective might be considered Humanist, in response to recent ideological leanings of the mother state. The fate of these none-too-likeable characters might be considered trite or insignificant. But its hard not to suspect that the film is not entirely about its characters. It's about the parameters of desire, the way in which desire binds and releases us. The things it can make us do or not do.

It might be noted that Winslett is described by the anonymous narrator (a late editorial choice to echo American Beauty or always part of the plan?) as being small-chested and dowdy and not Patrick Wilson's type at all. The fact that the red swimsuit she wears for large stretches of the movie shows her to be neither particularly small chested, nor particularly dowdy, is typical of the neat contradictions the director either gets away with or provokes.