Review by Beatrice On 06-Jul-2023
Very powerful is he who has himself in his own power
At the pinnacle of her career, iconic, enigmatic musician Lydia Tar, the first woman conductor of a major German orchestra, lives in a deluxe home with her partner, first violinist of the Berlin orchestra Sharon, and Petra the Syrian child adopted by the couple.
An interview with The New Yorker festival by Adam Gapnik focuses attention on the American conductor's biography: after attending Harvard, she majored in piano at the Curtis Institute before earning a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Vienna, specializing in music of the Ucayali Valley in eastern Peru, where she spent five years among the Shipibo-Konibo people.
An autobiographical book is coming out as he prepares for the demanding concert in which he will conduct Mahler's Symphony No. 5.
Power dynamics begin to get in the way: a woman in such an important role will have to make stark choices that in the long run will strain the musician's psychophysical and relational solidity.
The subject, written exclusively for Cate Blanchett, portrays a complex figure with obvious character weaknesses and psychosomatic fallout.
The continuous, annoying, sometimes obsessive noises that disturb the musician's sleep and daily routine reveal the composer's personal/affective/erotic/professional conflicts and torments.
The amount of noise that a person is able to endure, without suffering, stands in inverse proportion to his intellectual capacity and can thus be considered an approximate measure of the latter
Amid learned quotations, refined settings and sophisticated aesthetic/musical mechanisms, glorifying and devious, shifting and precarious power creeps into the management of Tar's private and then public life.
She, who has climbed the ranks of the Big Five, America's big five orchestras, received the four major awards, Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony, and entered the shortlist of colors that are called EGOTs, also establishes a school to provide opportunities for young female conductors.
Great visibility, power and notoriety that Tar's musical talent, so adept with sheet music, instruments and conducting will have to confront with the awareness and ability to direct her own private and public life.
How much does the prestige, notoriety as well as success achieved presuppose a talent that can remain confined exclusively to the professional world?
As Berlin's first female conductor, she will have to confront her own inner ghosts.The film, a well-orchestrated psycho-thrilller, manages to compose a plot where the dissonances are perfectly disturbing.
A highly sophisticated symphonic construction succeeds in breaking down the biographical planes of a great talent between success, love, and power with deft technical-directorial ease while the screenplay succeeds in ensnaring the viewer in a constant and relentless tension.
The business behind the world of classical music is depicted with ferocity and the implied power dynamics are a constant.
A talent's ability to concentrate is not enough; with success, identity becomes a social and political fact always poised between democracy and autocracy.
A film that tells a kind of fable: this is a world that remains the exclusive preserve of the male sex, and its return among the ethnic group living in the Ucayali region testifies to the more or less sought-after need for a recovery of the relationship with Mother Nature.
If you want to know someone's true nature, you have to give them great power
06-Jul-2023 by Beatrice