![]() (The other four are Katharine Hepburn, Frances McDormand, Meryl Steep and Ingrid Bergman.) A few weeks after we speak, she will receive her eighth Academy Award nomination and, should she win – she is currently favourite – will become only the fifth actress in history to have been awarded three or more Oscars. It is the third time she has triumphed in that category. I am speaking to Cate Blanchett via a video call to Los Angeles just two days after her portrayal of Lydia Tár won her the best actress award at the Golden Globes. In a way, the film is a Rorschach test when it comes to the kinds of judgments people make in terms of the information that is alluded to, but never confirmed.” Not only is the character very enigmatic, but the facts of what has transpired, if you want to call it the plot, are very vague. A lot of people who have sat with it or watched it again have expanded their perception of what the film is. I also think it’s hard sometimes for journalists, because they see so many films and then they have to give an immediate opinion. “I have been very reluctant to talk about the film,” she says, “partly because it is so ambiguous and I don’t want to define it for anyone. ![]() I ask Blanchett what she makes of such responses, if indeed she reads them at all. For Brody, it epitomised “a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics.” Depending on where you stand, the scene dramatically condenses or renders as cliche the current generational cultural battleground in which the earnest certitudes of identity and gender politics threaten the once-sacrosanct status of canonical – white, male, heterosexual – culture. He took aim at one scene, in which Tár rounds on a nervous young music student, Max, who identifies as a “Bipoc pangender person”, and declares that he is “not into” Bach because of the composer’s misogyny. It enables, invites and often enshrines and rewards monstrous behaviour Writing in the New Yorker last year, Richard Brody set a high bar for aggrieved outrage, lambasting almost everything about the film, but particularly what he saw as its loaded ideological thrust. Put simply, Lydia Tár is a bully, a gleeful manipulator, and possibly a sexual exploiter of a series of young women in thrall to her genius. It has also incensed some commentators with its wilfully provocative portrayal of a powerful woman behaving as badly as powerful men more often do. Since then, the film has been hailed by many as a masterpiece, but has also been trailed by controversy, dividing opinion because of the culturally contested topics it touches on, including cancel culture and identity politics. Photograph: Album/AlamyĪt its premiere at the Venice film festival in September, Tár received a sustained standing ovation and Blanchett won the best actress prize, the first of several awards she has been given for her performance.
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