I’ve been scrambling and struggling since late Saturday afternoon, trying to understand what Todd Fields‘ Tar is conveying or not conveying (is it anti-cancel culture or is it slyly condemning Cate Blanchett‘s brilliant but callous conductor and more or less saying “well, she made her bed”?), and venting with friends about how I found Field’s decision to obliquely hint at plot developments occasionally infuriating.

Key HE passage: “This movie is so beautifully made, such an immersive pleasure, and yet so infuriating I could just punch a refrigerator.”

A friend believes that “the film’s elliptical quality is one of the things I absolutely adored about it…it kept me on the edge of my seat. And it’s what made me hungry to see it again (and I hardly feel that way about movies anymore).”

I feel the same way — I’m so upset by my negative reactions to aspects of Tar (while loving so much of it) that I want to sit through it again so I can (hopefully!) settle some of my issues.

Another friend insists that “the information you need is all there. It’s elliptical…but it’s not ambiguous. Some might disagree about this or that, but I think you’d find viewers disagreeing on what happened in many scenes in Bardo, a movie you seem to be cutting a thousand times more slack than this one, even though — sorry — it is borderline unwatchable.”

The focus in Tar is (a) the magnificent work and lifestyle of Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar — I wanted to move into this movie and live there and never come out — but primarily (b) the fanatical determination of “Millennial robots” (as Lydia calls them) to destroy careers of people they see as cruel and abusive.

It’s mainly about a faintly alluded to, stubbornly non-dramatized relationship between an ambitious student and Lydia, a powerful God-like figure in her realm, and how it went wrong and why, and how this resulted in a kind of blood feud — a deliberate act of career assassination and a form of sexual harassment.

But who rejected who exactly, and why do reasonable intelligent viewers of Tar have to argue about this hours later and still not be certain about what happened?

All kinds of exposition is deliberately left out of Tar, and it’s triggering. I’m sorry but Tar takes forever to get going (at least 45 minutes if not longer), and once it does it’s too elliptical, too fleeting, too oblique, too teasing and (I guess) too smart for its own good. It made me feel dumb, and I really hate that.

But I loved the flush world of brilliant, arrogant, confident Lydia. Not to mention the textures, the autumnal Berlin atmospheres, the perfect scarves, the dinners….I wanted to live in it forever.

The bottom line is that Field can’t be bothered to tell a story in a way that most people would find satisfying. He doesn’t show the stuff that we’d like to see and be part of, obviously because he feels that’s the most interesting way to deal the cards. But not for me. Elusive narrative games and coy hintings and teasings and dingle-dangle maneuvers…nope. Maybe if I watch it again it’ll somehow come together?

I’m terribly unhappy about how Tar played for me. It’s made me almost miserable.

A friend lucked into a screening of Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, which just premiered in Venice. Reaction #1: “It pains me to say this, but it just doesn’t work.” Reaction #2: “It’s just too stagey,” which is to say, I gathered, too visually confined, too static. But how can an adaptation of a play about a 600-pound guy who never leaves his apartment be opened up?

Let’s be fair and free — let the air and sunlight in — let’s see what develops.

Oh god it’s happening The Whale lived up and Fraser is coming pic.twitter.com/XjsaYYFi3X

— The Oscar Expert (@expert_oscar) September 3, 2022

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich is trashing the finest, most exquisitely composed, most emotionally moving film I’ve seen thus far at Telluride ‘22 — Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light (Searchlight, 12.9). Olivia Colman is 100% locked for yet another Best Actress Oscar nom; handsome and gifted newcomer Michael Ward is also amazingly effective. Utterly exquisite Roger Deakins cinematography. Extra–fine supporting turns by Colin Firth and Toby Jones.

Light will absolutely be Best Picture-nominated — I’ll make bets with anyone. I thought it might be some kind of woke interracial romance, but it transcends all that shit. I agree about Belfast but otherwise Ehrlich knows nothing…trust me! (And you can dismiss David Poland‘s reaction also,.)

Sprawling, story-less, Fellini-esque, strikingly conceived (to put it mildly) and somberly meditative, Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), which I saw last night at 9 pm, is one motherfucker of an older man’s interior dream-trip epic.

Because it’s basically a series of Tony Soprano-ish dream segments, or so it digressively seemed to me…flicked with foreboding and dread and yet darkly amusing. And there’s no way Bardo qualifies as a comedy, by the way…glumly satiric is a better description.

And yet you can’t say that Bardo isn’t delicious — “intermittently brilliant” is how a friend put it — in terms of all the visual seductions and titillations and wild-ass whatevers. It’s a feverishly imaginative, inwardly-focused, interior-dialogue art film that never once shakes hands or even acknowledges the mundane aspects of life as most of us know or perceive them. It’s a dream-realm thing, top to bottom and into the vortex.

“Bardo” is a Buddhist term that means “transitional state between death and rebirth.” Hence the dream-stream.

Understand that the dreams of Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a 50ish hotshot Mexican journalist and documentarian who, like Inarritu, has been living and thriving in Los Angeles with his family for the last 20-plus years…understand that Silverio’s dreams are somewhat darker and certainly more grandiose in a social-indictment sense than the more personalized and modestly-scaled dream sequences cooked up by Sopranos creator David Chase.

Inarritu’s dream trips are more imaginatively complex and cliff-jumpy and (here’s where the indulgent Netflix syndrome kicks in) big-budgety. All kinds of fragments and fantasies and social metaphors and projections of this or that, but most of it boiling down to “who am I and what am I doing?” as well as “fuck all the predators and cheapeners of this planetary existence that we’re all sharing” as well as an occasional “fuck me”.

There’s no debating the instant assessment that came out of the Venice Film Festival, which is that Bardo is Inarritu’s 8 1/2. There are other films in this self-examining, “I’m pissed off because I’m getting old and have run out of fresh ideas” fraternity — Bob Fosse‘s All That Jazz, Woody Allen‘s Stardust Memories, Paul Mazursky‘s Alex in Wonderland and (I’ll bet no one’s mentioned this one) Blade Edwards‘ That’s Life! (’86).

Seriously — the Wiki synopsis of That’s Life! is 90% Bardo: “Harvey Fairchild is a wealthy, Malibu-based architect who is turning 60 and suffering from a form of male menopause. He feels aches and pains, real or imaginary, and seems unhappy with his professional and personal life.”

Bardo often delivers the same kind of long and occasionally mystifying head-trip cards (“intermittently brilliant” means now and then) that 8 1/2 does, but it’s also warmer and more family-embracing at times. (I was especially taken with Griselda Siciliani‘s performance as Silvero’s middle-aged wife.) Stardust Memories is tighter and more entertaining. It’s deeper and stranger than Alex in Wonderland. Portions of All That Jazz struck me as more filling and exciting and urgent than Bardo, I have to say. It’s better than Edwards’ film — I’ll definitely give it that.

And yet portions of Bardo are glorious. I loved certain scenes so much that I didn’t want Inarritu to cut away. The opening desert sequence (a shadow running and leaping and flying, and then falling back to earth) is a wow. There’s a magnificent dance-party sequence that goes on for I-don’t-know-how-long, but it’s so exuberant and crazy-good I got lost in it. Not to mention a sexual episode here and there that did the trick. Not to mention a knockout battle sequence + piles and piles of dead bodies.

I feel as badly as the next guy about the wounds suffered by Netflix in Venice — the stunning 53% Metacritic grade for Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Bardo (which I’ll be seeing tonight) + the meh reception to Noah Baumbach’s White Noise.

Speaking as a staunch Inarritu fan over the last 22 years, it is my intention to be as fair and merciless and forgiving and open-veined as possible. “Too long” doesn’t bother me if the filmmaker is imbued or on fire. Inarritu is incapable of mediocrity.