WOMEN (AND MEN) TALKING

TAR(2022)

Todd Field’s ‘Tar’ is an unique foray into the mind of a creative individual whose days of unimpeded glory are not really numbered as much as they are under collective scrutiny. Here, classical music shapes the past for the present and has a role to play in perpetuating its integrity along with the maelstrom of opinions regarding its place in the modern world. Its practitioners hence cannot be far away from scrutiny.

To me, Lydia Tar is presented as an artist by way of a rounded individual. She is a creative genius and the monster in disguise. Away from the ballyhoo of popular culture implosion, Tar delves into a different kind of beast that’s gentle and generous but cannot let go of its illicit desires or almost craven quest for perfection. How much of those human elements end up elevating one’s hubris is the crux of the tale here.

This is about Lydia’s interactions with others, with the opening one-take interview and the Juilliard masterclass standing out the most. Hubris and the heightened sense of being a singular, elevated figure while others follow cues and hover in the shadows aptly captures a lack of humility that dawns on those with fortune. It is like that in the realistic presentation here. It’s in how she outsmarts her beloved daughter’s bully with threats of ‘punishment’, refuses to make eye-contact with her loyal assistant( Noemie Merlant whose gazelle like visage and wounded expressions are at the heart of the plot’s gradual unraveling), uses her position to bid for a senior orchestra member’s ouster and attempts to smooth things out with his partner of decades or always sits on her high horse when with another contemporary whom she clearly deems to be beneath her in terms of talent or vocation. Even her exchanges with her life-partner( a brilliant Nina Hoss underplaying the tragedy of being second-fiddle to a legend with absolute honesty) are cold and detached. This is a work where maintaining a distance from the protagonist is of primal essence in order to gauge her stature and the way she condescends to almost every living mortal she comes in contact with. The ‘I’ is the lethal weapon that self-destructs. It is her Achilles heel, for sure. But then it’s the nature of accolades and professional promotion that gives her that elevated ground to operate from.

When we take that into proper account, the surreal and the gothic here emerge from a mind weighed down by decades of impulses, behavioural tics and the ascent to an elite club. Tar eventually becomes a showcase for the real and the manufactured amid the painstaking creativity of her chosen field.

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The intra-gender dynamics are particularly compelling. Within that always potent whole, Lydia’s sense of motherhood becomes a salve against the homophobic slurs of her daughter’s classmates and her only part that remains pure and untouched by other baser instincts within her and the culture at large. The presence of Olga( Sophie Kauer), a talented musician who Lydia especially favours, acts as an embodiment of the past the latter left behind and the parasitic nature of transactional relationships which have always existed but now seem to come out of the shadows.

In this context, the use of the word ‘misandry’ makes sense; it’s a world in which grappling with implosions of her own doing and insecurities are informed by stringent cultural caveats. Men seem to be the real enemy from a cisgender, cultural and social standpoint. Ultimately, the haunted passages relay guilt, internalised shame and perhaps a deeper yearning for commeuppance.

The black dog in the underground manifests as all of that and as a metaphor for her own feral instincts once she is stripped of her power and unprecedented prestige. Cue the explosive turn at the live performance where she overtakes her male replacement, in a violent blow to the cultivated sophistication that endured for so long. In her haunted consciousness and display of internalised violence against the opposite sex, she is like Salieri ala Amadeus and Tilda Swinton in Memoria irrespective of gender and backgrounds.

That feral charge, the final passage’s change of location, domicile, fortunes and exposure to vulnerability in a place where nobody actually seems to care for her traces that light of hubris extinguishing. Though the work is approached with painstaking effort and grace, the full-circle moment has come. If not humility, this is the mortal undoing she had to experience.

Thinking about all these points, one thing’s for sure: TAR is subliminally rich and a deep dive into human nature that never reveals itself too neatly. The implosions and revelations are earned by our understanding of impaired humanity.

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CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA(2014)

In a film within a film conceit, the scenes in CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA are structured like a play befitting Juliette Binoche’s protagonist resurrecting a stage role that put her on the global map. Which is why it works so well as a chamber piece when Binoche, the actress playing an actress and the quietly spectacular Kristen Stewart as her personal assistant rehearse scenes with that given conceit and run along with it to deeper spaces. Spaces where intellect, ego, hubris, intra-gender and generational dynamics rivet us.

Much of it will qualify as a genuine chamber piece or series of vignettes. Only that the great outdoors courtesy Yorick Le Saux’s cinematography conflates with the personal bond here. Like director Olivier Assayas’ seminal Irma Vep, Clouds…. rests on its conversations. Assayas’ former work was more playful, dynamic, had a more physical edge. This one has a laidback vibe at the surface which breaks when latent tensions materialise with the rehearsals in a solitary home surrounded by the Alps. The subliminal conditioning of social hierarchy even between two individuals adds to the unraveling.

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Two women in love in the play while interlocked in a complex cold war of human behaviour and wit in real life present a parallel track seamlessly brought to the screen with all the naturalism it requires. The nurturer, the one who fends off another, in a dance of interdependency, have a lot to share about ideas pertaining to a text, perceptions and interpretation.

Till the ice breaks and there is levity, genuine camaraderie. When pressures are staved off, every artistic enterprise is not just another work commitment to be undertaken mechanically. Fiction is nothing but a larger, often darker refraction of personal complexities.

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA bears all those concerns with a coherent build-up to the final act where a surreal disappearance and the trusted assistant being replaced by a strictly professional, apathetic apparatus hits us in the gut. Similar to the lockdown effect that has got hold of us, this one brings out the best and worst out of human interaction. To top it all off, Chloe Grace Moretz is particularly compelling as the self-referential and cultural pivot around which this filmmaking conceit succeeds.

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LIGHTS OUT(2019)

When does a violation become a matter of unsavoury opinions? That is the disturbing subject brought to a compelling teleplay courtesy Manjula Padmanabhan’s titular, canonical Indian play. The inspiration is from real-life where educated individuals acted as mere bystanders to multiple women’s screams in an under-construction building opposite their apartment.

In this version from Zee Theatre’s roster, the politics around sexual violence and class foundations appertaining to the same become part of an educated middle-class discursive. This matter of conjecture, gendered opinions and an utter lack of regard for the violated body is relevant today as it was forty years back. It’s about the angles from which we approach contentious issues and escape our own roles as citizens and empathetic beings.

LIGHTS OUT holds us complicit not because our fears for retribution from anti-social elements are unfounded but because the death of reason and sensitivity springs from biases and inherent violence that patriarchy has beholden us to.

Even as Sandhya Mridul emerges here as a voice of reason and received horror, she is cornered by another man threatening to break her jaw while Smriti Kalra’s fear, mounting anxiety is seen as a psychological effect of her gender and weak mental bearings. They are gaslighted even when the danger is literally in front of them. The men practice voyeurism and machismo. The women implore them to take the course of law.

In the end, the silence and dying noise of a violation make the five protagonists stare out of the window. There’s no concrete resolution to curbing sexual violence or perpetrators. But there’s no real resolution to cowardice and lack of agency.

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