Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch TÁR
2022 · Todd Field · TÁR on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice where Tár sits in the frame early on. (camera)
Florian Hoffmeister centers her in wide, stable compositions that hand her the whole room. Later the focal lengths grow longer and the depth gets shallower, and she starts to look observed rather than observing.
Payoff: The framing reports her standing in the world before the plot does anything to it.
Listen for sounds nobody else in the film reacts to. (sound)
A child crying somewhere in the building at night. A refrigerator hum. A metronome that starts on its own. She hears all of it and can do nothing with any of it.
Payoff: Her interior lives in the soundtrack because she is never permitted to explain it out loud.
Watch the bodies move during the conducting master class. (staging)
Field shoots the scene unbroken. Blanchett takes the floor and the room while the student retreats, so an argument about Bach and identity becomes a question of who is standing where.
Payoff: The staging poses the problem and declines to settle it, which is why people still argue over the scene. In the reading: discourse-image. An image that poses a problem it will not resolve is what the reading calls a discourse-image.
Count the reaction shots the film refuses to give you. (cutting)
Monika Willi, who edited for Haneke, lets scenes run past their usual exit points and cuts away from the face that would tell you how to feel. Nothing gets underlined or explained.
Payoff: You have to judge from behavior alone, which is the position every person in the story occupies.
Watch how Tár describes herself in the opening interview. (performance)
Blanchett performs a public self for a real journalist in front of a real festival crowd, shot like a document rather than a scene. The vocabulary, the modesty moves and the anecdotes are all constructed.
Payoff: She talks a version of herself into existence, and the film hands it to you as if it were fact. In the reading: story-telling / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a person caught in the act of legending herself into being.
Once you have seen it
Track what the film actually shows about the accusations. (structure)
Emails, careful legal phrasing, a glance across a room, a deleted message. Nothing alleged is ever staged. You work backward from how she handles Olga and Francesca in front of you.
Payoff: True and false stay undecidable by design, and the film authorizes neither camp in the audience. In the reading: falsifying-narration. The reading calls this falsifying narration: two coherent versions handed out and no verdict offered by the film.
Look at the surfaces in the apartment she keeps. (setting)
Cold geometry, expensive modern furniture, everything curated the way a score gets curated. The orchestra's rooms hold the same ordered beauty and the same protocol over the same rot.
Payoff: An ordered world keeps its surfaces while it comes apart underneath, and the design shows you both at once.
Watch Sharon and Francesca watching Tár. (performance)
Nina Hoss plays a woman who reached a private conclusion some time ago and has not said it aloud. Noemie Merlant plays an assistant reading the room and protecting herself on terms the film never states.
Payoff: The people around her have been assessing her the whole time, and that is where the evidence actually sits.
Listen to the Adagietto and what the film does with it. (sound)
The Mahler carries its own history of beauty and decline from earlier films, and Field neither italicizes that nor throws it away. The recording deadline keeps the piece on a clock.
Payoff: The music is her identity and the instrument being used to measure her, in the same passage.
Carry this in: Notice how little you are actually shown. The film never lies to you and never lets you be sure.