Tár is a star.

A dark one.

Lydia Tár is a star conductor, an American living and working in Berlin, domiciled with partner, first violinist, Sharon, and their adopted daughter, Petra.

Brilliant at the baton, a perfectionist on the podium, Tár’s dark secret is her predatory philandering, a power player in grooming young musicians, a peccadillo that eventually compromises her career.

Cate Blanchette’s percussive performance has earned her an Academy Award nomination and it’s deserved. Pity the Academy didn’t go full monty and nominate her formidable co-stars, the incomparable Nina Hoss as Sharon and the astonishing Sophie Kauer as Olga, the current target of Tar’s insidious control.

However, Oscar nominations have been bestowed on writer/director, Todd Field for Direction and Screenplay, cinematographer, Florian Hoffmeister, and film editor, Monika Willi, all of whom bestow the film with a haunting quality.

Technically, Tár is one of the most proficient of this year’s crop of pictures, a metronome of menace, ticking time like a bomb countdown from lit fuse to explosion.

The film opens with Lydia being interviewed by the New Yorker magazine’s Adam Gopnick at a fictional New Yorker Festival. Gopnik, in his introduction, details Tár’s extensive achievements, including her early ethnographic field work in the Amazon and her tutelage under Leonard Bernstein. He also says that she’s an egot winner—Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony.

She has a formidable track record and is a formidable presence. Later in a teaching gig she parries with a student about gender politics and wokeness. Her acerbic wit is rapier sharp but is construed as bullying by some.

The argument here skirts cancel culture, the imperfections of perfection, the struggle between hubris and humility, the flaws in the glass of genius.

A study in the elegance of arrogance and pride coming before a spectacular fall, Tár will get you talking.