Tár (2022) review

Notable composer/conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) has a busy life: she lives with her sickly wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) and their adopted daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic) in Germany where she leads the Berlin Philharmonic, guest teaches a class at Juilliard (which ends disastrously because a certain generation can't mentally separate the art from the artist) and has a little writer's block going on (echoing the director's sixteen year "hiatus") ... but a former student named Krista Taylor has been harassing her after being blacklisted (the two of them had an "inappropriate relationship").  It starts off a bit smugly, with lots of musical terminology, grandiose posturing ("We are dealing with time!") and name-dropping of composers both living and dead (Bach, Mahler, Gould, Karajan, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, etc. get mentioned at some point) before settling in and proving to be an outstanding piece of character analysis: Tár, despite all her talent, thinks nothing of dismissing her assistant over artistic differences, threatening a schoolgirl, showing favoritism towards pretty Russian cellist Olga (Sophie Kauer) and mocking a college student's prejudices against musicians from the past (which gets secretly recorded, chopped up and posted on social media).  Field's icy direction brings to mind a particular filmmaker he worked with on Eyes Wide Shut (ol' Stanley would have been proud) and Blanchett balances out Lydia's flaws with her reckless passion (it might be her greatest role to date).  Still, the conclusion can't help but feel like something of a cheap shot: is playing songs from a video game really the ninth circle of Hell?  Did Field forget that Hildur Guðnadóttir, who did the music for this, also provided the score (along with her husband Sam Slater) for the Electronic Arts first-person shooter Battlefield 2042?