In the opening scene of Tár, conductor/composer Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett)—sitting for an on-stage interview—downplays the notion that her career has suffered much by virtue of being a woman in a male-dominated field. She's supremely confident in her skills and her artistic bona fides; she isn't interested in being defined by her identity as a woman or as a lesbian, which she makes clear later when she tears apart a non-binary BIPOC Juilliard student for their moral qualms about certain canonical composers. For Tár, it's all about the work—which makes sense, since we soon learn that her own personal behavior isn't exactly beyond reproach.
An intricate, magnificently-performed character study, Tár digs around in the messy area of the extent to which we are willing to separate artists' work from their lives. Writer/director Todd Field has crafted an almost ideal portrait of an abuser, because he's making it clear that such behavior has been primarily identified with men to the extent that men have primarily held the positions that allowed them to take advantage of those positions. And by doing so, he's captured a gender-blind notion of the old saw that sexual assault isn't about sex, but about power.
Power is something Lydia Tár has a lot of as a giant in her field, running scholarship programs and serving as maestro of the Berlin Philharmonic. Her domestic situation seems stable—she's married to the Philharmonic's first violinist, Sharon (Nina Hoss), and they share a young daughter—but there are clearly secrets she keeps. One of those secrets in particular bubbles to the surface when a former student of Tár's takes her own life, and the trail of responsibility begins to lead towards Tár's door.
It's also clear that whatever happened with that student, it was unlikely to have been an isolated incident. Field builds a terrific scene in which Tár and her Philharmonic colleagues are conducting blind auditions for a cello position, but upon the applicant's exit, Tár recognizes the shoes as those of an attractive young woman (Sophie Kauer) she spied earlier in the bathroom; Tár quickly erases the notes she had been making, likely to favor her new target.
While the dead former student exists in the narrative primarily as a ghostly presence haunting Tár—including a great moment that evokes The Telltale Heart—the new cellist establishes the pattern. Lydia Tár is a predator.
But in the tradition of all the best character studies, it's also not that simple. Blanchett's imperious demeanor is a perfect fit for Tár's sense of herself, but what she conveys best is the extent to which Tár's sexual manipulations are merely one manifestation of the ways in which she revels in showing off her power over others. When she learns that her daughter is being bullied at school, Tár approaches the young bully in the schoolyard and basically threatens to do her harm, reminding the child that no one would believe her if she claimed such a threat had been made. She dangles the possibility of promotion in front of her long-suffering assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), and she works to force out her assistant conductor, for reasons that seem primarily connected to what the ability to hire for the post allows her to do. Blanchett delivers these moments with the kind of supreme confidence characteristic of those who leave those around them unsure whether they're witnessing force of personality, or flat-out force.
Field isn't shy about immersing viewers into the world of classical music, including jargon-filled conversations between colleagues and plenty of references to the particulars of the field. There's a risk of losing laypeople with such an approach, and indeed the first hour of Tár is so dense that it might seem a little alienating. But it's also a crucial way of emphasizing that Lydia Tár is a kind of genius—and that being a genius shouldn't grant a "get out of consequences free" card. All the way up to the fantastic final shot, Tár makes it clear that the protagonist's passion for her work is limitless, no matter what kind of music she's conducting. That ferocity, as is the case with so many people in positions of power, is both what got her there and what turns her into a particular kind of monster, and there's no particular restriction on the kind of face that monster might have.