Opinion In Cate Blanchett-starrer ‘Tár’, a rare inside look at a cancelled artist’s life

The art-vs-artist debate is, at this point, tired. Artists with power will continue to abuse it, audiences will continue to — sometimes guiltily, sometimes not — favour personal pleasure over a distant victim’s unseen suffering, and there will always be those who ask, “Well, we can’t cancel everyone who has a problematic past, otherwise who will we have left?” This, fortunately, is not a dilemma Tár bothers with. Using scenes like the one above, the movie establishes early that art and its problematic origins can be evaluated simultaneously. Such evaluations are not mutually exclusive. Instead, what it asks of Tár’s music career, one that proves to be highly controversial, is a far more pertinent question.

In the #MeToo/cancel culture era, what debris does this punitive process leave behind? In a social media tornado that breeds misinformation, mobilises protest but fuels harassment, who pays for their crimes, who is caught in the crossfire, and who is there just to watch the fireworks?

At the start of the film, Tár is at the height of her career and refuses to acknowledge that patriarchy affects artists anymore — she’s world-famous, so how can her industry be sexist to women? She brushes off concerns about gender bias and says to an interviewer that her contemporaries shouldn’t complain: “It’s the women before us that did the heavy lifting.” She is often brutish and curt with subordinates, emulating the men of her generation. She wants to trash her orchestra’s founding principle of having only female players because “it feels quaint to keep things single-gender. We’ve made our point.” She argues that the 19th-century Austrian composer Alma Mahler can alone be blamed for the death of her career because she “agreed” to her husband’s demand to stay home and support his musical career. “No one made that decision for her,” she says, ignoring the historical context, “Hashtag rules-of-the-game.”

This image released by Focus Features shows Cate Blanchett in a scene from “Tár.” (Focus Features via AP)

But there is a dark tail to Tár’s meteoric rise. She has groomed and sexually abused multiple young female students over the years. Her wife, Sharon, a violinist in the same orchestra, does not know. Her colleagues know, but don’t say anything. Her students suspect but don’t speak out. When she expels one of her victims, Krista Taylor, and blacklists her across the industry, Taylor repeatedly tries making her way back, to no avail, before killing herself. A suicide note is found. All eyes, hitherto lowered, turn to Tár.

The aftermath, narrated entirely from the maestro’s vantage, is where this film shines, offering a rare “inside look” at the life of a cancelled artist.

Social media goes first. Scrolling aimlessly on Twitter one day, Tár finds a piece of smartphone footage from her lecture with Max, damningly edited to recontextualise her words into language unacceptable in a classroom. Later, another account posts a video of her recently exiting a car with a young girl (her temporary assistant-cum-orchestra cellist — also being groomed, by the way), crassly captioning it, “@Tár and her fresh meat.” On the way to a book launch, she sees youngsters run along her car waving placards (“Justice for Krista Taylor”), presumably mobilised after a publication interviewed other students of Tár’s, who substantiated previous sexual abuse allegations.

Her personal life collapses next. Sharon confronts her for never discussing Taylor, or preparing her family for the humiliation they might face, and takes their daughter away. Tár’s neighbours and colleagues boycott her. She loses her position with her current orchestra, then infiltrates their performance and assaults the conductor onstage, and, losing all work and reputation, relocates to a distant country where she begins conducting music for a video game and its cosplaying audience. A far cry from her former towering stature.

Tár begins her journey as a staunch advocate for assessing art apolitically and ends up becoming that stance’s strongest possible counter-argument. Of course, in real life, artists rarely suffer immediate and long-lasting consequences of their actions the way the protagonist of this movie does. But this is how it can be — some might say that this is how it should be. Tár’s story shows an imperfect world deciding, however imperfectly, that the hurt caused by an artist cannot be excused, no matter how great their art is.

udbhav.seth@expressindia.com