Stark Confines.

BOOKS & the ARTS WE FIRST MEET LYDIA TAR WAITING IN THE WINGS OF AN Wauditorium, called to the stage and lavished with a listing of her accolades: She is a lauded composer, a trained concert pianist, one of only 15 people to score an EGOT, and the holder of a PhD in mu- sicology from the University of Vienna, where she specialized in the Indigenous music of eastern Peru's Ucayali Valley. In these stark confines, made icier by a muted blue light that washes every frame in a clinical pall, the putative "Other" becomes conspicuous: Tar's snide remarks about the "Chinese market", the BIPOC student she bullied at Juilliard, even her daughter, who is a Syrian adoptee. But before we hear Tar (played by Cate Blanchett) deliver her prestige-laden salvo, we are primed for the film's incongruous mix of affects by an opening that is equally oblique. [Extracted from the article]