Anyone else see this?
I ask because there's zero chance anybody I know irl would have seen this?
Any good takes?
I'm still trying to figure out my take. Bad part is it was too...boring...to watch twice. Good but...slow.
Anyway this entire world of cultured urban elite professional is so entirely alien that it was kind of awkward to watch. I don't even own a suit, I will never see a prestigious orchestra anywhere but YouTube. Even if I like classical music, which I do, these trappings make it clear it's not FOR ME.
the way these NPR rich libs are so just elite about something as raw as music. The scene where she had to help the disabled woman back in her chair and immediately went home to wash herself. They might work in passion for a profession but these people are sooo sterile.
It's attitude on cancel culture is something I'm still trying to work out. Lydia lecturing the zoomer student looked like something theys post on redscarepod. Then they slowly revealed that she was a groomer. I liked that. You wouldn't automatically put up your defense mechanisms, they convinced you she was a villain
I thought Tar was brilliant as well, reminded me of a Haneke film where he makes these portraits of miserable petty bourgeois people and then reveals how depraved and disgusting they are. If you liked this kind of film The Piano Teacher, also about this same kind of stuffy and insular world of haute classical musicians, is fantastic. I also thought it was funny how Lydia Tar loves Mahler and dismisses a lot of the more modern classical pieces I love; her comments about serialism made me want to fight her. Mahler is such a bore to me, and in the classical music world of today if somebody talked like Lydia Tar I'd think she's a loser because her taste is just really boring.
I will say, as a member of that "cultured urban elite professional" world you should absolutely just go see a prestigious orchestra if there's one near you. It's not at all like that as an audience member. Tickets are cheap (like $20 if you're under 60, these orchestras desperately try to get younger audience members), I wear normal clothes (jeans and a t-shirt), nobody gives a shit about culture, most of the audience members "accidentally" clap in between movements and it's not a big deal, people are just there to see some of the best musicians on the planet play some soul wrenching music.
piano teacher is a clear comp, but field has infinitely more sympathy for blanchett than haneke has for huppert. i don't really feel like the directors are coming from the same places at all.
I think I agree in that it felt like Field was trying to make me have sympathy for Tar on some level, but in the context of how disgusting and pathetic she is it didn't land for me in the slightest and I just viewed her like Haneke views his characters anyway. I think you can read it as a Haneke-like film because, despite the director's best efforst, it still comes across that way.
well, then, if you make Tar, it will read similar to haneke.
but haneke's interest is a scathing critique about the bourgeoise (i'd agree with you on that), all the way through. and though field notices and presents the (evil)constitutive power of the elite/hierarchy (it creates Tar/destroys Lydia, and those around her), he's more compassionate, more interested in opening a space for discussion/thinking (rather than polemic), and, on a substantive level, finds something valuable in high culture. (obviously the ending is a big goof on lydia: she's reduced conducting video game scores (and she can't even dictate the tempo) -- she's been flattened and humiliated. and yet, she is someone with great integrity (in at least a narrow way) and great passion for music-- she focuses on that score as if it were mahler. and she's presented as the alternative to our current cultural horizon: dorks cosplaying monster hunter.)
you certainly can have your feeling on the characters, but i couldn't imagine watching lydia in her childhood room, watching the bernstein tapes, realizing that her purported tutelage from bernstein, which she previously had just droned on and on about, is just those public television productions, realizing that she's a fraud as much as any fucking annoying zoomer, that everything is self-made narrative/fiction, that she had to alienate herself from her childhood memories wherein she fell in love with music, i couldn't imagine watching that not feeling sympathy for her.
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Yeah see that whole scene did not land for me even though I totally get what you're saying. Just didn't work, just made me think she was more sad since she even changed her name just to create this persona that has now fallen apart. This is a personal flaw I think but I was basically revealing in Lydia's downfall for the last third of the film. Good analysis though, I'm just much more cynical so I find Fields attempts ultimately unconvincing.
haneke might suit you then lol (also dig him, Cache esp.)
ok well that was actually a vacation idea I was having.
My family, we always went to like myrtle beach for vacation but what I want to do is go to a real city and sample the arts.
I wouldn't fit in though.
It's two fold. First there's the part with the suits. I'd feel completely out of place at a classical concert. (the movie also made me feel this way. Half the references Lydia made went over my head. Classical music itself is like this, pieces have allusions to other pieces)
Then there's the part where I go back home to my job at the hillbilly shop and people say "so what'd you do on your vacation", oh yeah I went to see Mahler at the Met. I can't share it with anybody.
Art is communicative and person-to-person. It's about sharing. Lydia's world is a highly highly gatekept garden of exclusions. She decides to impose auditions on a solo that didn't need auditions. Is she an artist or is she a gatekeeper?
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Lydia is a gatekeeper for sure, but I promise you you wouldn't feel out of place at like the NY Philharmonic. It's just normally dressed people. If you wear a suit to a concert it's kind of weird unless it's like opening night to an opera at the Met. The actual world of classical music wants more people to listen, it's actively trying to be accessible and easy for you to go to a concert and have a nice time. Nobody will think you're out of place, everybody will be happy you're there.