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.