Cate Blanchett is smoking in our first look at… | Little White Lies

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Cate Blanchett is smok­ing in our first look at Todd Field’s new film

25 Jul 2022

Words by David Jenkins

A woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes, wearing a light blue shirt, looking intently at the camera against a dark background.
A woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes, wearing a light blue shirt, looking intently at the camera against a dark background.
His first film since 2006’s Lit­tle Chil­dren cen­tres on composer/​conductor Lydia Tár as she pre­pares to record her mag­num opus.

One of the great things about the 1960s/’70s era of Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing is that stu­dios did not fear the con­cept trail­er. Those instances where you’re not just serv­ing up a siz­zle-reel from the film’s best bits (which have usu­al­ly been engi­neered to work in the trail­er for­mat), but doing some­thing inno­v­a­tive and fun.

Flashy edits are notice­able by their absence in the trail­er for Todd Field’s Tár (stylised as TÁR) which goes full con­cept in fea­tur­ing a sin­gle shot of Cate Blanchett’s face as coils of smoke emanate from her mouth in super slow motion, over which a voiceover intones a mono­logue which speaks of why this is a sto­ry for our time and all times, etc…

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This is Field’s first time off the direc­to­r­i­al bench since 2006’s laud­ed Lit­tle Chil­dren, and it’s a bio­graph­i­cal film about female clas­si­cal con­duc­tor Lydia Tár. From the short sequence at the end, seems like Blanchett’s been hon­ing her baton skills, and she’s also laid down the gaunt­let for Bradley Coop­er whose own biopic of Leonard Bern­stein is due in 2023.

Tár is due in cin­e­mas in Jan­u­ary 2023, and looks like it’ll be an award sea­son behemoth.

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