He has already won the Oscar twice, and has been in the final round on 5 other occasions. And although after taking the Volpi Cup for best actress from Venice and her triumph at the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice and the BAFTAs, one might have the feeling that Cate Blanchett will win a third statuette this Sunday, the award that won her rival Michelle Yeoh at the Screen Actors Guild Awards (in addition to also winning the Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy) and the fact that the Malaysian has never even been nominated before may leave you wanting again. The truth is that this veteran of the awards race has done very little campaign to promote Tár, the film that marks the return of Todd Field to directing 16 years after the premiere of Secret Games.
In a long question and answer session at the film's presentation in the city of canals, in which she was accompanied by her co-stars Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss and Sophie Kauer, as well as the director, the Australian actress explained who she was In his opinion, the protagonist, an orchestra conductor whose prestige collapses due to accusations of sexual harassment: "She is someone who obviously feels persecuted by someone or something. Because of her past, because of herself, because of things she did. She is a someone who has put his past in a box and thought that thanks to his great talent he could reinvent himself, be saved, changed and transformed by music, but that does not stop them from continuing to persecute him", he explained with his characteristic eloquence, and then added: "All of those elements are in the movie. While we were shooting it, that chase was very much there. That's why it's been fascinating working on this film with Todd, who is a king when it comes to dismissing what is unnecessary and do it in the best possible way. That's what makes him such a great filmmaker, because he had no problem minimizing something that initially seemed essential to this story."
When asked about the contrast between her Lydia Tár at her most exultant moments and those when she is overwhelmed by the accusations against her, Blanchett stated that radical transformation was a hallmark of Field's cinema: "There is a very simple and special moment in which he decides to change history. His characters are deeply human and the viewer is invited like a fly on the wall to discover in a deeply intimate way the inner machinations of people", he described, to later affirm: "I knew from the first syllable of the script, that it is very well worked, that this was a truly complex character. But I didn't know exactly why. The experience of filming it was part of a process, in which everything evolved and changing. But there was something that probably never changed, that I always ended up coming back to, and that is that Lydia was a person who is distant from herself. Something that, in a way, is something c Common to all characters. We are all a bit like that. You don't need to be a concert pianist or the conductor of one of the best orchestras in the world to experience that feeling. I believe that she is someone who has many contradictions and that is something that Todd wrote from the beginning, that Lydia Tár is many things and that she has had a very varied career. She has gone from going to the Ucayali Valley with the Shipibo-Conibo as an ethnomusicologist to leading one of the best orchestras in the world. So for me the hard part was trying to build a psychology that went from one thing to the other, including the taunts that Todd included in the script."
Owner of a career approaching a hundred credits, Blanchett has certainly done all kinds of characters. However, there was no shortage of people at the event who pointed out that, like the protagonist of "Carol", for which she was also nominated, Lydia is openly gay: "I did not think about the gender or the sexual orientation of the character in the most minimum. But not at all", he confirmed, admitting that this was one of the things he liked the most about the film: "It is a very human portrait. I also think that we have matured enough as a species to watch a film like this and that that not be the headline. She just is. And I find that really stimulating. In fact, it wasn't until we started the promotional campaign that they said: "women are the axis of the story". It was only then that I realized that It was like that. While I was filming it, it didn't even occur to me," he said.
The 53-year-old Australian emphasized instead that the film proposes a reality that doesn't exist yet: "Todd says this is in a way a fairy tale because there isn't a female conductor yet who is in front of a big German orchestra. They still have a very pyramidal and very patriarchal structure, in which women can only conduct romantic music. Now that is changing. But we have to continue to politicize it, so that this change continues and normalizes because that way it will be a healthier art form. We don't want to classical music to become museum pieces," he suggested.
