Is the Tár Ending About Divine Punishment or Reclamation?

And to be sure, there is no personal or professional redemption possible after she’s outed for grooming and preying on her young assistants—and certainly not after she strikes her male replacement (who is a mediocrity riding her coattails) in front of all of Berlin! It’s the end of her prestige, her marriage, and her pride. Nonetheless, there is a genius about this character that suggests a long abandoned integrity. It cannot be redeemed, but perhaps it can be reclaimed, if only for herself.

When Tár begins at the aforementioned New Yorker Festival, the sequence acts as a shrewd exposition dump by Field’s screenplay. Gopnik reads a glittering and trenchant resume to a Lincoln Center audience that is so detailed it almost has to be true. At the end of this recitation, Gopnik says he saw Lydia wincing as he unspooled her many triumphs and successes. She then appropriately plays the humility card, making a self-deprecating remark about how polite society reveres the specialist, not the jack of all trades.

However, this faux self-flagellation is a put-on. Later in the same scene, Lydia explains how the role of the conductor is to create the illusion of sudden epiphany or inspiration during a performance in front of the audience, “but the reality is right from the very beginning I know exactly what time it is, and the exact moment that you and I will arrive at our destination together. The only real discovery for me is in rehearsal. It’s never in performance.”

Lydia’s entire life is a performance though, right down to her supposed flinching in front of Manhattan’s insulated literary bubble. We never actually see Blanchett’s face during these displays of shyness. Rather Field intercuts the scene with intimate moments from further back in Lydia’s timeline. We see the image of Tár towering above her vinyl collection of Mahler performances, including that of her idol Leonard Bernstein. Field’s godseye view of her aligning her records suggests she is likewise curating her own life’s work. The insidious reality, however, is already present with the disembodied foot of a young woman slipping into frame. In retrospect, it’s presumably the toes of the doomed Krista Taylor (Sylvia Flote) or her current assistant Francesca Lenten (Noémie Merlant). It’s illusion and reality, side by side.

Francesca is at the opening scene, too, mouthing every word Gopnik is supposedly embarrassing Lydia with. Clearly Tár and her assistant edited this introduction (if not wrote it themselves), and the only thing that Lydia winces over is Gopnik slipping in an ad-libbed joke about Tár’s forthcoming memoir, Tár on Tár, being an excellent stocking stuffer.

The irony of this orchestrated self-congratulation is that Lydia clearly is framing herself in the shadow of her mentor Leonard Bernstein. It is even his recording of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 5” that she gives pride of placement while laying her record collection out. And at the end of the movie, for the first time in presumably decades, Lydia seems able to really listen to what the legendary New York Philharmonic composer has to say.