Maestro-Maestra

Abstract

The controversy surrounding Todd Field’s Tár (2022) focused on its narrative of Lydia Tár’s moral turpitude and the ways in which it incited the kinds of public response collected under the term “cancel culture.” While that is certainly a boldly stated concern of the film, this essay argues that the representation of debates around cancel culture are in fact presented through a series of cliched public interactions, where there is little nuance and little surprise. Instead, Hardie suggests that in scenes that describe the infrastructural back space of Tár’s career, a more subtle and intriguing set of exchanges between women is shown. These exchanges are not exempt from the charge of turpitude, but rather are nuanced through their formal and contextual properties. They rely on the film’s citation of the prestige lesbian films of recent past, Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015) and Portrait d’une jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma, 2019) through the presence of Cate Blanchett and Noémie Merlant and on a queer potential derived from these spaces of segregation and intensity. Tár uses this opposition of open and closed spaces to set the stage for its coda, where the cosmopolitan landscape of Tár’s life is supplanted by something more genuinely of the world.