Cate Blanchett casts a spell over any role she takes, whether on stage or screen, indie or blockbuster. She has played a 16th-century monarch (Elizabeth), an ageless princess (Lord of the Rings), a predatory Nazi collaborator (Th e Good German), Katharine Hepburn (The Aviator), a British schoolteacher who has an affair with a teenage student (Notes on a Scandal), even a version of Bob Dylan, complete with big hair and sideburns (I’m Not There). In each case, she is fully them, and fully herself before our eyes.
After such a breathtaking gallery of characters, perhaps the backstage conflict, onstage triumphs, sublime highs and soul-searching lows of the music world are not so impossible a leap for Blanchett to take in making her latest film, Tár. After all, the process of immersion and transformation is not unknown to those of us who play and listen to Bach and Chopin and Mahler.
Blanchett plays a fictional conductor, Lydia Tár, near the peak of her career. Approaching 50, Tár stands in front of
