Let’s Tálk About the Ending of 

Tár

By  Jackson McHenry,  a Vulture senior writer covering theater, film, and TV

There she is: Linda Tarr. Photo: Courtesy of Focus Features

Tár is the funniest movie of the year, though you may not key into director
Todd Field’s bleak sense of humor until you arrive at the grand, most obvious
joke at the end. By then, the disgraced conductor played by Cate Blanchett has
left her glamorous life in Berlin and New York behind after reports of her
grooming students broke in the press, and she has taken up a new job
conducting an orchestra in Southeast Asia. (The dialogue doesn’t specify
where she is, though performers from the Siam Sinfonietta play in the film.)
Lydia seems disdainful of her new surroundings, but she slowly settles back
into her old routines. She studies a score, lectures her musicians, and even
goes to a massage parlor where she chooses a masseuse from a selection of
young women with the implication that she may again be taking sexual
advantage of the less powerful. Then we get to her big return to the podium.
She prepares the orchestra and then screens descend behind her. A CGI
flag is projected onto them. We hear serious video-game-style narration, and
as the orchestra plays, we see the crowd is full of people cosplaying as
characters from the video-game series Monster Hunter.

What a place for Lydia Tár to end up! Given how much she reveres the western
canon and sneers at conventional “robots,” the term she uses for people who
don’t get her genius, we can assume she would hate video games and sneer at
their music in any other circumstance. (It also seems that Field watched
footage of actual concert performances of the Monster Hunter soundtrack;
they seem like a pretty fun time, all things considered.) The film starts at
the New Yorker festival and ends at a concert of video-game music. If you’re
invested in the contrast between high- and lowbrow culture — the film
certainly is, devoting much of its run time to the specifics of Lydia’s rarefied
world, from her concrete-chic Berlin apartment to her suite in the Carlyle
Hotel — you get a stark sense of how far her career has slid. It’s a bitterly
funny moment and a hell of a kicker for her journey.

But if we see almost all of the film’s action from Lydia’s perspective (aside
from a few text messages), the movie pushes you to question her view at all
times. To her, this may be an embarrassing gig, but she’s still in charge of an
orchestra and in a position of power relative to the people around her. Is this
an appropriate cosmic punishment? Is it too much? Too little? She’s working,
which is the thing she loves to do most but also the thing that grants her the
power she abuses.

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Then you have to consider that this all may be part of Lydia’s larger comeback
scheme. Earlier in the film, she meets with a crisis-PR firm of some kind, and
a younger male employee suggests she needs to create a new narrative around
herself. Perhaps going off to conduct a new orchestra is part of that narrative
and this is only a show of humility. The film reminds you that Lydia began her
illustrious career by studying the music of an indigenous group in the Amazon,
and one suspects she may be trying to use the orchestra at the end in a similar
way: to boost a career that will curve back toward western music. The fact
that Tár itself uses a faceless nonwestern location for its ending, however,
doesn’t give it a lot of grounding for some strong anti-colonial argument. It’s a
little too infatuated with Lydia’s perspective to do that.

We also have to acknowledge that Lydia Tár isn’t even the character’s real
name! When she goes back home to the suburbs, we discover, thanks to her
brother Tony, that her real first name is Linda, and if you look closely at her
old diplomas, you can see her last name is actually Tarr. She remade herself
somewhere along the way; she’s probably hoping to restart her career with her
video-game orchestra in the same fashion. The movie also mentions that her
birthday is coming up, so the specter of age also lingers around her, the notion
that you can constantly re-create yourself, as she has, up to the point where it
all catches up to you. What then? By the end of the film, Lydia is “canceled” in
that she has been removed from the highest echelons of western classical-
music performance, but she’s already trying to transform again and perhaps
climb her way back. The extended coda suggests that such cancellations are
really impermanent, that this one is less a full stop than a pause in Lydia’s
career. She’ll never stop trying to remake herself.

But what about all the people who surrounded her demise? It’s still hard to
know exactly who sent the text messages we see at the start of the movie, for
instance. I’ve debated this with some of my co-workers, but my best bet is that
because we see the Russian cellist Olga (Sophie Kauer) livestreaming Lydia’s
reading of her book, Tár on Tár (that title is the funniest recurring gag), near
the end of the film, she’s probably the one who did the texting. She might have
seemed innocent to Lydia earlier, but Olga clearly knows more about the
conductor’s reputation than she lets on. She was probably texting Francesca
(Noémie Merlant), Lydia’s former assistant who suddenly leaves after not
getting a conducting job in Berlin. Francesca kept her emails from Lydia’s
student who had died by suicide and might have been involved in bringing the
story to the press’s attention. (Francesca also could have had a phone inside
that Juilliard master class where Lydia berated a student and from which
doctored footage later leaked.) Those initial texts on the plane include a line
about how “s was with her this morning,” probably referring to Sharon (Nina
Hoss), Lydia’s wife. Sharon proves by the end of the movie that she knows
Lydia’s behavior well and was willing to go along with it until it threatened
their family and daughter. Could she have been working with Olga and
Francesca to undermine Lydia? Who, after all, was getting all those cryptic
gifts for Lydia and drawing those mazes on her stuff? Just the one former
student, or multiple people acting together?

It’s easy to fall into conspiratorial thinking because the movie encourages you
to think as Lydia herself would. She believes that all the people around her
exist to be used and that everyone else would do the same to her if they could.
Even before we get a sense of her sexual misconduct, we can see that all of her
relationships are transactional, as Sharon puts it. Note how Lydia uses Mark
Strong’s Elliot Kaplan for his money and private jet in exchange for dribbling
bits of her musical insight in his direction. (Notably, she doesn’t seem to have
given him enough early in the movie and has to fly commercial, but then she
flies private on her return trip as the pressure on her increases and she’s
leveraging all she has, and then it’s commercial back to Berlin after her
downfall.) Lydia is enough of an asshole that the people around her could
easily have all just had enough and then scavenged what was left of her career.
Kaplan, after all, seems perfectly happy to have taken her Mahler 5 notebook
and used it himself for the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert before she tackles
him out of revenge. Or was he part of the scheme against her all along, and did
Sharon or Francesca steal the notebook for him in advance?

There’s much to be uncertain about by the end of Tár in different beguiling

ways. That’s mostly because Lydia herself is such a mutable figure, absolutely
vile from one angle, understandable from another. She’s clearly a problem, a
monster who has clad herself in all the opinions and attitudes that would let
her succeed in classical music, but what exactly can you do with that problem
once it exists? Tár doesn’t seem to be sure, but it’s interested in how the
typical course of comeuppance for a figure like Lydia is both insufficient and a
little absurd. At least those Monster Hunter fans are in for a hell of a concert.