At film festivals, reality and fiction sometimes blend in strange ways.

For example, an Italian journalist looks at the trailer of Todd Field's new film "Tár" on his smartphone seconds before the film starts, which will be shown here shortly.

And when the film starts, there's a smartphone again, this time on the screen, oversized.

The display shows clearly what is happening in the background: Cate Blanchett is slumped over an airplane table, her eyes covered by a sleep mask, her mouth half open in the uncomfortable transit slumber.

The voyeur behind the smartphone sends the recording as a live video, chats with a second person and exchanges ironic remarks about the otherwise hard and unapproachable conductor Lydia Tár,

which Blanchett embodies here.

Only much later are we to find out who took the video.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

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The smartphone view already points to the conflict between public and private life, in which the main character will soon find himself.

Director Todd Field cleverly introduces her: while a New York journalist introduces her at a podium event, listing her virtues and merits – Lydia Tár is chief conductor of one of the most important orchestras in the world, Mahler expert, Emmy, Grammy, Oscar nominee and Tony winner - the director captures Cate Blanchett pale with excitement before she has to take the stage, only to flash a winning smile in the spotlight.

We see her ordering tailor-made suits, clipping sheet music to a piano, scattering dozens of records on the hardwood floor of a sprawling apartment, moving barefoot between them, wiping away with her big toe,

what seems inappropriate.

We see a person who means nothing more than their work and does not tolerate mistakes, least of all in themselves.

A little nervous twitch

Todd Field has only directed two feature films, In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2016), both of which received critical acclaim and Oscar-nominated scripts.

"Tár" is his third film after a 16-year break.

Field began his acting career with roles including Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut;

as a director, he pays great attention to giving his actors as much space as possible.

The concept works, he only worked with the best.

In the marital drama "In the Bedroom", for example, Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson have eye-to-eye duels that could cut you, and in "Little Children" Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson build up almost unbearable tension over the smallest of gestures.

Field supports his actors with clever camera work.

focuses on their faces,

Cate Blanchett, for example, shows her excitement at the podium event with a little nervous twitch, which Lydia Tár, however, only allows on the side of her body that is turned away from the audience.

The camera also manages to keep the faces of both women in view when Tár hugs her wife Sharon (played superbly by Nina Hoss), allowing viewers to understand the words the women say to each other through facial expressions and gestures to truths tap off.

Nina Hoss is Blanchett's match in talent and skill.

When sex creeps into the game with power and ego and a young cellist makes eyes at the conductor, one look from Hoss is enough to show that the marriage of the two women has more chasms than the intact facade would suggest.

Dream sequences flow seamlessly into each other

Because the festival programming sometimes creates strange cross-references between films, Alejandro Iñárritu's "Bardo, the invented chronicle of a handful of truths" also has a man wrestling with his art.

Silverio is a documentary filmmaker, made a name for himself as an investigative journalist in Mexico and then lived in the USA for many years.

Now, in his late fifties, he is supposed to be accepting an award for his work in Los Angeles and is having self-doubts about it.

"For years I've sought the approval of people who despise me," he will say to his wife, getting lost more and more between reality and dreams.

Compared to "Bardo", Iñárritu's predecessor films "Birdman" or "The Revenant" seem almost conventional.

The dream sequences merge seamlessly, sometimes peppered with the blackest humor (a baby that doesn't want to be born is pushed back into the womb without further ado), sometimes with historical accounts (Silverio discusses with the Spanish conqueror Cortéz on a mountain of corpses). or caught up in current political crises.

In Mexico City, a woman falls motionless onto the street.

"I'm not dead, just missing.

They don't even want to know what happened,” she whispers.

Dozens of people fall to the ground around them, a picture of the people who disappear every day in Mexico without their stories making the news.

The film throws you back into reality harder than headlines on a smartphone could.