I watched TÁR (2022) the other night and it made me yell with horrified glee So Many Times. It’s not quite three hours long but it took me five hours to watch because I kept having to scrub back and repeat bits of it. Todd Field really made a puzzle box full of gender politics, classical music history, linguistics and queerness specifically for me. I’m obsessed, I’m feral, I’m gnawing on this signed first edition copy of Vita Sackville West’s Challenge that I found in an airplane bathroom trash bin,,

Unfortunately I can’t find anyone who’s analyzed this film any deeper than “Cancel culture got her” or “There’s a GHOST” or “God forbid women do anything.”

I wanna talk about the narrative implications of Mark Strong’s awful wig, his mention of deadstock pencils, and the man at the next table over staring at him while he talks. I wanna annotate Tár’s absolutely slimy speech to Max about Bach and Beethoven. I itch to take a magnifying glass to her crisp but immensely juicy conversation with Adam Gopnick. I’m gnashing my teeth at the introductory scene of her throwing around Deutsche Grammaphon records like frisbees, stepping on them barefoot, while Gopnick reads out her dizzyingly long curriculum vitae.

And that’s just the first twenty minutes. Don’t get me started on ,,Ich bin der Vater von Petra’’, the distant screaming in the park, the abandoned apartment complex, the box marked “Sundries”, Francesca’s abject misery juxtaposed against her heroism, the metronome in the cabinet – The labyrinth motif? HELLO???

*tries to shove the entire film into my mouth and fails because it’s too rich and dense*