That goes for the wealthy investor - a terrifically oily Mark Strong - who's funding a conducting fellowship, and also her hard-working assistant, Francesca, who aspires to be a conductor herself. Lydia isn't just a conductor at the podium she treats everyone in her life as if they were a member of her own personal orchestra, to be manipulated at will. They have a young daughter, though Lydia is too consumed with work to have much family time. While her work often brings her to New York - she teaches at Juilliard - she makes her home in Berlin with her partner, Sharon, an accomplished violinist played by the superb German actor Nina Hoss. Tár runs more than 2 1/2 hours, but I found it mesmerizing - not just as a character study, but as a thoroughly persuasive portrait of the insular and competitive world where Lydia holds sway. The writer-director Todd Field has a masterful understanding of time himself. Movie Interviews Cate Blanchett Finds Humor In The Painfully Absurd

We also learn about her devotion to great composers like Mahler and great conductors like Leonard Bernstein, and about her thoughts on how conductors shape and manipulate the flow of time. This scene and others are a feast for classical music buffs: We learn about all the orchestras Lydia's conducted, the music she's composed, the films she's scored, the books she's written and the many awards she's won. The movie begins in Manhattan, with Lydia in a lengthy onstage conversation with the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.

But Blanchett makes you believe in Lydia's genius immediately, before we've even seen her pick up a baton. A lot of movies about artists - even real-life artists - have a hard time convincing you of their characters' accomplishments. To play the fictional role of Lydia Tár, world-renowned conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Blanchett learned to conduct music, play the piano and speak German - not all at once, thankfully, though I'm sure she could if called upon to do so. Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned conductor in the film Tár.īy this point, we don't need any reminders of what a great actor Cate Blanchett is, but we have one anyway in her new movie, Tár.

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