Tár — Cate Blanchett is wildly magnetic in a film of rare greatness

At last. The interval between great films — the unmistakable real thing — is long and lonely. Hallelujah, then, for Tár, with Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, American classical conductor and composer of vast global fame. It is brilliant, and it is singular. Like many great films, it is also, on a certain, deep-down level, a horror movie.

Yet to begin with, only those fearful of liberal Manhattan will sweat. The opening scene is an onstage interview conducted by (real) New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, in front of a New Yorker crowd. The Tár CV is duly unfurled: an endless, glittering list of landmarks. Knowing details pile to the side. Her new book is published by Nan Talese; her suit tailored by Egon Brandstetter. Amid the blizzard of triumphs and namechecks, Tár speaks. “Keeping time is no small thing,” she smiles.

The line rings darkly through the film to come. For now, director Todd Field is still only nudging us off-balance. The pinpoint references are enough to blur the fiction, to make you almost take this for an actual biopic. That much has an echo in Lydia, an alpha success so driven she might kick through the fourth wall into reality.

And the film seems at first a simple glimpse behind-the-scenes. Our super-conductor leads the Berlin Philharmonic. There are diligent assistants and private planes. Somehow, she has time for a family too. Her wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) is also her first violinist, their home a luxe apartment in Berlin’s Charlottenburg. Their daughter is six, and troubled by a playground bully.

Tár offers so much to find out for yourself, I’m tempted to stop there. Suffice to say that at the next school drop-off, Lydia offers the culprit advice. “God watches all of us,” she says. She is no longer smiling.

But by now, the film has shifted register. The cue is another school; another confrontation between youth and experience. This time, the setting is Juilliard, where guest tutor Tár ponders Bach, and gives voice to the idea that talent conquers all. If you understand artists only through gender, ethnicity, or even their terrible, destructive behaviour, well then — what of art?

Her students are sceptical. “You’re a fucking bitch,” says one. If you’re choosing sides, wait till you see Lydia pick on the student concerned. Where another film would play cancel culture for laughs — or nervously avoid the subject altogether — Tár meets the moment head on.

The result is thrilling. The world of the film is hyper-specific. It is also the one we all live in, right now. Movies should take place here more often. More crucial yet, what it says about our intergenerational conflict is neither earnestly didactic nor sneeringly clichéd. It may even change your mind. Imagine.

Soon, it is clear that abuses of power are no mere talking points. An unrevenged wrong ticks away in Tár. The movie takes us where it leads with bravura style. Field last directed a film 17 years ago, the family satire Little Children. Before that, he was an actor, appearing in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Tár shares with that movie a sense of swelling urban dread. There are disembodied screams in Berlin parks. A monster is loose.

That Tár makes its flawed Great Man a Great Woman only deepens the flavour. So too that a film about the cult of personality hinges on a star turn as wildly magnetic as Blanchett’s. The ending, meanwhile, is one for the ages, at once a jawdropper and coolly inevitable. “God is Change,” wrote science fiction novelist Octavia E Butler. And God, to paraphrase Lydia Tár, always catches up with you.

★★★★★

In UK cinemas from January 13 and US cinemas now