Cate Blanchett is Lydia Tár: conductor, writer, EGOT, sex pest. We watch her career implode when a former protegee kills herself, leading to allegations.
For me, the key scene in this movie was the one toward the end where Tár, now disgraced, is back in her childhood home, wearing a medal she must have won in middle or high school, watching a tape of Leonard Bernstein talk about music. She’s crying but I don’t think it’s because she’s in the doghouse. She’s crying because Bernstein is earnestly communicating something about art, and she, in her various prestigious wanderings, has lost the knack of this entirely. Instead, she’s pretentious, she lives in an expensive apartment that looks like a tomb, she doesn’t know how to talk about this thing that matters most to her without seducing or bullying or throwing up a smokescreen. She can’t…