Tr Review: A maestro facing the music

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At the beginning of Tr, there is a photo of a Wikipedia entry being edited by invisible hands. Whose hands? This question will prove relevant to the plot, but for now it’s overwhelmed by the mystique of the subject of the pages, who is also the protagonist of Todd Fields, a cruelly elegant and elegantly cruel new film.

Her name is Lydia Tr, and in the world Field imagined one that exists at an oblique angle to ours, it’s a household name. She is brought to us by New York writer Adam Gopnik, humbly playing himself as he interviews Lydia, majestically played by Cate Blanchett, on a Manhattan stage. Gopniks’ introductory remarks provide a Wikipedia-style summary with a bit of a Talk of the Town watermark, establishing that this is someone who surely needs no introduction.

Lydias rsum is a litany of meritocratic glory and upper-brow glitter so brilliant it borders on satire. She is a conductor and composer a maestro who claims Leonard Bernstein as her mentor and whose career has been a steady ascent through the great orchestras of Cleveland, Boston and New York to her current perch at the Orchestra. Berlin Philharmonic. She has a doctorate from Harvard. and belongs to the very exclusive club EGOT, having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. She has recorded all of Mahler’s symphonies except one, which is coming soon, as well as a book, Tr on Tr, which is sure to be a bestseller.

How did she do it? If Lydia Tr were a real person, Tr could walk the conventional musical biographical route, tracing a path from humble beginnings to hard work and strokes of luck, adversity and triumph. That would be a remarkable story, considering that in the real world, very few major orchestras have been led by women. (Nathalie Stutzmann, recently appointed Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, is currently the only one in America, as was Marin Alsop until she left the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra last year.)

Like Late Night, the 2019 film that introduced Emma Thompson as a powerful network TV talk show host, Tr doesn’t so much shatter a glass ceiling as it dissolves it through creative fiat. The rise of Lydias is not what we are here to see. She was installed at the pinnacle of her profession so that we could witness her downfall.

Following Lydia from New York to Berlin, Field sows omens and red herrings on her way, slowly and deliberately fostering a mood of dread and paranoia. She receives as an anonymous gift a first signed edition of the novel Challenge by Vita Sackville-Wests which she destroys in the toilet of an airplane. Strange noises at home disturb her sleep and distract her from her work. A curious visual pattern, a labyrinth or a mandala, mysteriously appears in strange places.

During this time, there are hints of domestic and professional problems. Lydia lives with Sharon (Nina Hoss), the Philharmonics’ principal violinist, and their young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic). Couples’ intimacy is lined with distrust and unspoken resentment. Sharon looks perpetually tired. Their child is being bullied at school. The second longtime bandleader (Allan Corduner) has overstayed his welcome. Lydia’s assistant, Francesca (Nomie Merlant), who has her own musical ambitions, looks at her boss with adoration, terror and seething rage. A young Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer), auditions for a place in the string section, catching Lydia’s eye with her expressive bowing technique and blue suede boots. (Kauer, a professional cellist and actress, plays herself in the film.)

Field, whose cold, psychologically charged style evokes Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick, he had a memorable small role in Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut records it all with ruthless detachment and fanatical control. It transitions smoothly from dry backstage comedy to something like gothic horror. We can’t be sure if Lydia is the monster, the victim, or both.

Does the suspense that builds through the film’s long, perfectly executed middle section come from the fear that something terrible will happen to her, or from the premonition that she’s going to do something horrible? Both results are plausible. From the start, we witness his quiet betrayal and occasional gaslighting of Sharon, his silent humiliation of a benefactor and rival bandleader (Mark Strong), and his chilling confrontation with Petras’ bully. . This scene, in which Lydia poses as Petras’ father and threatens a small child in perfect German, is both thrilling and terrifying. His charisma is irresistible, his power unchecked and his confidence absolute.

All of that is about to change, a process Field watches with almost unbearable objectivity. If he refrains from schadenfreude, he also retains compassion. If Tr unfolds in a rarefied cultural space, where aesthetic perfection seems less an ideal than a daily expectation, it also plants itself in a vulgar and contentious zone of contemporary discourse. Field leaves no doubt that Lydia is a formidable musician, able to match Mahler’s genius with hers and inspire others to reach the heights of greatness in her company. Blanchett is quite convincing in this regard and also in showing Lydia’s imperiousness, sadism and predatory manipulation of young women like Francesca and Olga.

At one point, Sharon describes all of Lydia’s relationships, except with their daughter, as transactional. It’s an accurate, if somewhat abstract, word for a pattern of chaotic and destructive behavior that Lydia’s position allowed her to get away with. His appearance is equally chaotic, as Tr refuses to resolve into either a parable of #MeToo justice or a rant about the excesses of cancel culture. (He’s so committed to his no-commitment stance that he sacrifices a dramatic ending for a tattered, errant, superfluous denouement.)

Towards the end, Leonard Bernstein appears, in a wonky black-and-white video recording of one of his concerts for young people, to explain that the meaning of music lies in how it makes you feel. A piece of music, he says, transports you through time on an emotional journey that defies summary. Sometimes feelings are so complicated and particular that they have no name, and Tr, whose smooth visual surface is troubled by the passions of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor and the original score by Hildur Gudnadottir, comes close to this condition.

He invites you to think seriously about Lydia, the meaning of her work and the consequences of her actions, whether she is someone you should admire or despise, whether artists should be judged on their work or on the way they live their life. In different contexts, Lydia herself defends both sides of this issue, as many of us do, and to look to the film for a coherent argument is to miss the point and fall into a misconception. category, misinterpreting the extraordinary shot that Field and Blanchett fired from the stoppage. We don’t care about Lydia Tr because she’s an artist; we care about it because it is art.

TrRated R. Violent dissonance. Duration: 2h38. In theaters.

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