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Tár review – Cate Blanchett is colossal as a conductor in crisis

Venice film festival: The actor is utterly magnetic as an imperious maestro in this ultra-stylish drama with a shocking climax

N o one but Cate Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for this engrossing movie from writer-director Todd Field, about a globally renowned conductor heading for a crisis or crackup or creative breakthrough. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt. She holds the screen for two and a half hours, aided by Florian Hoffmeister’s epic cinematography, a tour de force of control, effortlessly keeping us waiting and guessing for an almost tantrically deferred climax. And when it comes, it is certainly shocking, if a little melodramatic and even absurd in ways that this ultra-stylish movie can’t quite absorb.

She plays Lydia Tár, imagined to be principal conductor of a major German orchestra, addressed by colleagues as “Maestro”. There are lots of scenes shot in the real concert hall, and Tár has an onstage interview with a real journalist: the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, playing himself – which could have been a gimmicky and self-conscious shortcut to authenticity, but isn’t. Tár is passionate, demanding, autocratic, with a rockstar prestige and an international touring lifestyle approaching that of the super-rich, and now very keyed up as she approaches her new challenge: a live recording of Mahler for Deutsche Grammophon. Tár is in a live-in relationship with her first violinist, played by Nina Hoss and they have a child. They live in a spectacular apartment, but Tár sentimentally keeps her scuzzy old Berlin flat as an office, bolt-hole and composition studio.

There are problems in Tár’s life. She runs a mentoring scholarship programme for women, administered by a tiresome, oleaginous would-be conductor, played by Mark Strong , and there are rumours that this is a source of young women with whom Tár has affairs. Her assistant, played by Noémie Merlant (another would-be conductor) appears to be someone else she is keeping on an emotional string and she is being stalked by another former mentee who has become obsessed with her; Tár has furthermore conceived a tendresse for the new Russian cellist. Meanwhile, her guest masterclass at Juilliard goes horribly sour when a young student, identifying as BIPOC pangender, presumes to dismiss Bach on ideological grounds and Tár humiliates this young Gen Z.

And all the time, Tár suspects that there is something wrong: she is twitchy, paranoid and insomniac. We know from the outset that she is effectively being spied on. There are strange sounds, intrusions and things out of place. Tár threatens a little girl at her daughter’s school that she hears is a bully. And the music itself, so far from being an emollient, amplifies the violence just beneath the surface. It could be that Todd Field has fallen under the spell of the maestro himself, Austrian director Michael Haneke, with these ideas about surveillance, the return of the repressed and the tyranny and cruelty in the bürgerliche European classical music tradition.

Tár has a job in which hubris pretty much comes with the territory: like a field marshal, you have a baton. There’s no point in being a conductor who is shy and retiring: the job requires you to stand in front of musicians on a podium, directing them with extravagant gestures. And Tár has a natural way with all this, with all the politics, and the diplomacy and the media-management. She has invented herself through conducting: no other profession and no other kind of musical career could have done it. And there is something genuinely moving when we see her watch an old video of Leonard Bernstein teaching children about music. I am not sure that all the film’s disparate and intriguing tics and hints and feints all come satisfactorily together, but what a colossal performance from Cate Blanchett .

All our reviews from Venice 2022

• Venice film festival 2022
• First look review
• Cate Blanchett
• Classical music
• Mark Strong
• Venice film festival

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Cate Blanchett give a tour de force performance in “TÁR”

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), is a fictional conductor and subject of the astonishing new film, “TÁR,” opening October 14. She is first seen being introduced by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik — he is interviewing her on stage — as one of the most important musical figures today. An EGOT, she graduated from the Curtis Institute and conducted in Philadelphia before her current positions at the New York Philharmonic and as Berlin’s principal conductor. Tár (who is so formidable, she should probably only be referred to by her last name) was mentored by Leonard Bernstein, and like him, she is working on a recording of Mahler’s 5 th symphony. 

The extended conversation with Gopnik displays Tár’s wit and erudition and shows her at the top of her game. But then, her flirting after the interview with Whitney (Sydney Lemmon), an adoring fan, reveals how Tár may be a superstar, but there is also something hinky about her. (One can hear her loyal assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), roll her eyes witnessing this coquettishness.)

Another remarkable sequence early in the film features Tár teaching a masterclass at Juilliard. As she instructs Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), a BIPOC, pangender student, about Bach — whom, as a dead, straight white male, he can’t take seriously — they discuss identity politics. Tár, a self-proclaimed “U-Haul lesbian,” however, is more interested in the music. She explains how a conductor can make the audience hear a piece they know well, differently. She also talks about, “the humility of Bach.” 

Writer/director Todd Field’s captivating character study shows that Tár needs to learn some humility herself. With laser-focused precision and detail, the film depicts how Lydia Tár’s ego and pride become her undoing. It is a combination of ambition and aggression that drives Tár, but her behavior soon comes to be viewed as highly inappropriate. 

Blanchett gives a tour de force performance that shows exactly what makes Tár tick. It is simply impossible to take one’s eyes off the actress during the film’s entire 157 minutes because she swaggers through with such gusto and bravado it is bewitching. Blanchett, in an Oscar-worthy turn, relishes her every scene, especially an amusing moment where she plays the accordion. Her face is a malleable canvas that conveys so much emotion — haughtiness, exasperation and exhaustion, adoration and adulation, as well as absolute rage and pain — sometimes within the same scene. Whether it’s her listening to musicians’ auditions and expressing agony or ecstasy, or having a meltdown in an airplane bathroom, Tár’s every emotion is visible. 

Arguably, she can be at her most expressive when she is poker faced. A scene of Tár threatening her young daughter’s bully at school reveals how she is at once both in control and out of control. It is fascinating to see Tár scheme, but it is also clear her agendas are both personal and professional — and she needs to check her privilege. 

It is an hour into the film before Tár is first seen conducting, but she performs her craft with a passion and verve that is mesmerizing; it illustrates her genius. Yet Tár is someone who always conducts, or rather, manipulates, things to her advantage. Some of that may be her entitlement — as when she wants to rotate her assistant conductor Sebastian (out actor Allan Corduner) to another position. But some of it is personal, such as giving Olga (Sophie Kauer), a new cellist Tár becomes smitten with, a plum part in a concert, or taking her along on a trip with the intention of seducing the young woman. 

Tár’s attraction to younger women is her Achilles’ heel. She is mostly (and not unexpectedly) unfair to her long-suffering partner, Sharon (Nina Hoss, terrific, but underused), who is a violinist in the orchestra. Sharon endures Tár’s bad behavior until her reckless actions threaten to destroy their family. A subplot involving an incident with a former student of Tár’s has potentially serious and lasting consequences. 

Adding to her sense of dissociation, Tár starts to hear various sounds — a chime, a scream, a metronome, a rattle in her car, or a hum from the refrigerator — that provoke and disturb her. Her carefully constructed veneer starts to crack. She has difficulty sleeping, and soon experiences some physical and emotionally painful moments, suffering both insults and injury in her efforts to groom Olga. Watching Tár grapple with the escalating and uncomfortable situations she finds herself in — and seeing her mask drop as various pressures mount — reveal her true character. 

Oddly, watching Tár endure a series of setbacks provides a perverse kind of pleasure. As she receives her come-uppance in a wild, extended coda, “TÁR” delivers a fantastic punchline that is both graceful and stinging. 

Riveting from start to finish, and energized by Blanchett’s stupendous performance, a fantastic score, crisp cinematography, and Field’s total command of tone, “TÁR” is an absolute triumph.

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The 7th annual Sun Valley Tour de Force will take place on July 18-20, 2024

The 6th Annual Sun Valley Tour de Force, July 20-22, 2023, is a weekend of epic proportions for car lovers of all ages. Event partners have included McLaren, Porsche, Bugatti, BMW, and Singer Vehicle Design, to name a few. The signature event of the weekend is the ‘NO SPEED LIMIT’ runs at Phantom Hill. Located in the heart of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, 3.2 miles of state highway becomes a no-speed limit zone.

Named by Barron’s, “One of the best driving events in the world,” for one day only, drivers are allowed to put their machines to the ultimate test. To date, the fastest speed on record is a Bugatti Chiron achieving 253.01mph. Drivers come from all over the country and beyond, it’s truly an experience of a lifetime. Eight events take place over the course of three days.

Additional weekend events include scenic drives, a curated Car Show, hosted sponsor events and a live auction fundraiser; Cars & Comedy. The weekend raises funds for The Hunger Coalition, a 501(c)(3), running the local food pantry, children’s programs, organic garden and education programs, and local partnerships for the 52% of locals struggling with food insecurity or only one life event away. In 2022, Sun Valley Tour de Force donated $600,000 to The Hunger Coalition. Watch the 2022 highlights here  2022 SVTdF video 

Sun Valley Tour de Force is produced by Intrepid Events, Inc.  – a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN 82-4422113) . Intrepid Events Inc, dba Sun Valley Tour de Force,  is run by Co-Directors Maya Blix and Whitney Werth Slade and aims to create unique events that engage visitors and locals and raise funds to support local charities making a difference in the community. Sun Valley Tour de Force is the first event launched by this organization.

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‘EO’ Review: Imagining the Lives of Other Creatures

The titular character of this fantastic adventure is no Disneyfied, cutesy creature. The director Jerzy Skolimowski emphasizes his animality and un-knowableness.

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By Manohla Dargis

The title character of “EO” — a shocking and tender tour de force about life, love, death and the wretched disregard human beings hold toward other living creatures — stands roughly four feet tall. He has large ears, knobby knees, a softly rounded belly and dark, soft eyes that see the world in blunt terms. He is gentle, observant, generally quiet, and can run with surprising speed, which he does when his uneventful life takes a turn for the disastrous. His needs are basic, his life humble. He’s a faithful friend and a dutiful worker. He’s also a donkey.

EO is an astonishment and so too is this wild, boldly expressionistic movie that conveys the life of its largely silent protagonist with a bare minimum of dialogue. At this point, I should reassure you that EO doesn’t talk — he’s an animal, not a cartoon — though the few people in his life sometimes speak and yell and whisper, including to him. You understand their words and obviously so does EO, who will bob his head as if in answer, but his inner being and outer reality are expressed through the world he lives in, through pastoral landscapes and shadowy barns as well as in textured close-ups, jolts of angry color, frenzied edits and gracefully sensitive camerawork that races, soars, occasionally lurches and even trembles.

This is the first movie that the 84-year-old Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski has made in seven years, a period that seems to have fired up his imagination beautifully. (His films include “The Shout” and “Moonlighting.”) Written by him and his wife, Ewa Piaskowska, “EO” has a streamlined story that, in its basic outline, adheres to the hero’s journey only to deviate drastically from that template. In short, EO sets off on an adventure, enters a realm of near-supernatural wonder, encounters fabulous and less so forces, experiences challenges and temptations (including a wreath of carrots). He also meets Isabelle Huppert in an Italian villa, though she ignores him. His journey is strange, absurd, exhilarating and terrifying.

It begins in a circus and ends in the abyss. In between, EO journeys from Poland to Italy through woods and streams, down underground passages and across city squares, encountering a range of people, some kind, others monstrous. He also comes across a menagerie of other creatures, including a slithering toad, a watchful owl and a soulfully howling wolf in a dreamy nocturnal scene that turns into a nightmare when unseen hunters begin shooting. At another point, while he’s being transported by truck, EO watches a herd of majestic horses gallop across a field; in a particularly grim scene, he lands in a fur farm filled with cages of terrified foxes whose cries are silenced by a lethal electronic prod.

“EO” recalls other animal adventures, like “Black Beauty,” Anna Sewell’s heartbreaker about a horse, but Skolimowski’s touchstone here is “Au Hasard Balthazar,” Robert Bresson’s sublime 1966 film about a donkey who is loved, brutalized and eventually dies in a state of grace. Bresson once said of his donkey that he “has in his life the same stages as does a man, that is to say, childhood, caresses; maturity, work; talent, genius in the middle of life; and the analytical period that precedes death.” I’m uncertain about EO’s analytical period, but he too is caressed and worked. He’s intelligent and, importantly, he has feelings, especially for Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), a young performer who uses him in an animal act in a small Polish circus. She loves him, but also betrays him.

That EO feels may seem unremarkable, particularly given all the chattering, wisecracking animals that populate mainstream children’s movies. In most of these entertainments, though, the animals primarily come across as people in cutesy, bowdlerized animal drag. In this calculus, wagging tails are acceptable, but not so those other unruly, messy and embarrassing (to us!) body parts. The Disneyfication of the natural world may have had a salutary effect on generations of filmgoers, encouraging them to see other creatures as more than threats to be contained and as something other than tonight’s dinner, but that’s only because movies tend to turn animals into humans.

Skolimowski, by contrast, consistently emphasizes the animality of EO and, by extension, the donkey’s essential un-knowableness and mystery. Although EO is repeatedly shown in long shot, say, when trotting over a ridge or across a field, he is often shown in closer, more intimate views. Again and again, you see one of EO’s eyes in extreme close-up, so that they become darkly shimmering pools in the center of the frame, and you also see different sections of his handsome smoky-gray coat. In some shots, the camera focuses on a human hand as it smoothly caresses EO, allowing you to see — and nearly feel — the hairs on the donkey’s coat as they’re touched, how they gently shift, stand, quiver and resettle.

These close-ups have seemingly distinct yet finally harmonizing consequences: They bring you close to EO (it’s no wonder that you fall for him so quickly), but they also underscore his differences, the integrity of his being. He walks on all fours and eats grass, is covered with thick hair rather than naked skin, and has a muzzle, a mane and clopping little hooves. Over and over, Skolimowski reminds you that EO is an animal, not a prop or a plushie, a comic contrivance or a child substitute. He is not human, and yet he is nevertheless a being with a sense of the world and he deserves a place in it. He also has, as Skolimowski repeatedly suggests, desires — EO yearns for Kasandra, green pastures, soft caresses, freedom.

As you may have guessed, EO’s life, alas, is not one of freedom and kindness, even if the movie overflows with both. Life is brutal for animals, EO included. Skolimowski isn’t scolding us or trying to punish us for EO’s fate. Rather, if anything, in this remarkable movie, he is inviting us to make the empathetic leap across species and consciousness, to look at the world we’ve made for ourselves and to see, really see, what we lose by treating other beings as lesser. We lose the world. Perhaps this sounds grim, but no movie that I’ve seen this year has moved me as deeply, made me feel as optimistic about cinema or engaged me with such intellectual vigor as “EO,” whose octogenarian genius auteur and all the donkeys who play EO — Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela — deserve all the love and the carrots, too.

EO Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Tour de Force

Alvaro Silberstein, MBA 17, helps those with disabilities navigate the world.

Back when Alvaro Silberstein was a teenager who surfed, snowboarded, and played on Chile’s under-19 national rugby team, he sometimes imagined a scenario in which he might need a wheelchair. “I was involved in sports where those kinds of injuries happened,” says Silberstein, “so I did consider the possibility. I loved being outside in nature, and I always told myself that if I faced the kind of mobility challenges that meant I couldn’t go on big outdoor recreational adventures, I would prefer to die.”

Then the worst actually happened. When he was 18, Silberstein was struck by a drunk driver and left fully paralyzed from the chest down and partially paralyzed in his arms and hands. Since that day, he hasn’t just continued to undertake physically arduous adventures in remote locations around the world, he’s also co-founded a company, Wheel the World, that makes it possible for travelers with disabilities and their families to follow in his wheelchair tracks—and forge their own new trails. “We’re trying to change perceptions around disabilities and push the boundaries of what’s possible,” says Silberstein.

The idea for the company was born from an ambitious trek in Patagonia that Silberstein took in 2016, while still a student at Haas. His dream had always been to visit the rugged Torres del Paine National Park in Chile and traverse its iconic five-day W Trek.

“My friends and family in Chile had been there, but I assumed it was impossible for me,” says Silberstein. “But after my experience in California, where I was amazed that I could visit places like Yosemite, Big Sur, and the redwoods, I said, ‘OK, let’s figure it out.’”

Together with his childhood friend and Wheel the World co-founder, Camilo Navarro Bustos, Silberstein began organizing a trip and fundraising to purchase a specially adapted wheelchair built to handle rough terrain with the help of a team. That’s when the two men realized they had a unique opportunity: they could make the chair permanently available in Patagonia to other adventurers with physical limitations. “We had the chance to not only impact my life and fulfill my dream to visit Patagonia,” Silberstein says, “but to open this path to others.”

In April 2016, together with a film crew and a team of twelve—including experienced mountaineers, disabilities experts, and a physical therapist specializing in spinal cord injuries—who pushed and pulled the chair along the arduous 50-mile route, Silberstein completed the W circuit, arriving at the Mirador Base de las Torres as a national hero in Chile.

Before Silberstein even made it back to the airport, there was already an inquiry about using the adapted wheelchair for a 14-year-old boy who had refractory epilepsy and who was later able to complete the trek as well. “The real aha moment was when other disabled people reached out to say, ‘I want to do that same trip,’” says Silberstein. “That really validated our decision to start Wheel the World.”

Expanded purpose

Today, Wheel The World has 28 employees from 10 different countries, working across the globe from Berkeley, California, to Santiago, Chile, to Lyon, France, and beyond. Initially the focus was on guided adventure travel like Silberstein’s Torres del Paine trip, but demand from travelers with disabilities for destinations closer to home caused the company to expand its remit. “Wheel the World is the Expedia of accessible travel,” says Silberstein. “You can book a hotel in New York City, but you can also book a five-day trip to Easter Island.” Travelers book through GoWheelTheWorld.com, and the company generates revenue like any other online travel agency.

One reason travelers with disabilities appreciate WTW is the granular detail the company provides on accommodations—not just whether a hotel or an experience is standards-compliant. “In the U.S.,” explains Silberstein, “standard ADA-compliant bed height is something like 80 centimeters, because many in the U.S. use power wheelchairs that are relatively tall. In Spain, however, a standards-compliant bed is only 40 centimeters high, because the majority of users there are in lower, manual chairs.”

That’s why WTW listings include exact measurements for bed heights and bathroom door widths, availability of ramps and elevators, hearing disability guidance, and more. The listings are developed with the help of volunteer “mappers” who take measurements and photos of hotel rooms and facilities. The detail enables travelers with disbilities and their companions to enjoy their vacations without the anxiety of unexpected access issues—in other words, to have a trip exactly like those that able-bodied travelers take for granted.

Silberstein says that hotel and tour operators are eager to work with WTW to learn how to make their properties and experiences more inviting for the disabled community. In part it’s because the market for accessible travel encompasses so much more than just the estimated 15% of the world’s population that has a disability—it also includes their travel companions as well as aging travelers who may need special accommodations. Half the customers booking travel via WTW are the able-bodied companions or family members of a traveler with a disability, Silberstein says. “We like to say that the disabled are the only minority that isn’t actually a minority.”

WTW offers a free online course around accessibility for travel professionals, enabling destinations and hotels to become a certified WTW partner. “We will achieve total inclusion when we make businesses realize that if they build customer experiences that are well-designed for people with disabilities, it’s a good opportunity for them, too,” says Silberstein.

Sense of urgency

WTW’s pre-pandemic growth certainly reflected that market potential, with the company roaring from a record 2019 into January 2020 with a new round of funding and a long list of projects to undertake. Then came COVID, and its universal beatdown to the travel industry. “The pandemic was a disaster for the goals we had set,” says Silberstein. “So we focused on what was in our control: developing systems and technologies to accommodate our growth once the pandemic was over and building more partnerships with operators and hotel chains around the world.”

That pivot paid off. In 2021, despite continued challenges to the travel industry, WTW served five times the number of people it did in 2019. Silberstein plans to keep that momentum going. “In 2021, we impacted around 1,000 people; we want to make that 5,000 travelers by end of 2022,” he says. To do that, WTW plans to expand to 45 employees and to increase the number of “products” (i.e., WTW-accredited hotels or tours) from 600 to 9,000 within the next two years. The company recently closed a $5 million Series A funding round, including backing from the former Booking.com team, which should help make those ambitious growth targets possible.

The very success of WTW contributes to Silberstein’s sense of urgency. “We recently heard from someone whose boyfriend had both legs amputated six months earlier and who was finally feeling ready to look at travel experiences again,” he says. “She went on our platform to research accessible destinations in Denver, which we don’t cover yet. But she thanked us for leading the way, because it had been difficult to find useful resources for planning.”

Like so many stymied travelers during the past two years, Silberstein has been making plans for his own post-pandemic excursions. “I have been so focused on work for the past two years, but I really want to do a trip to Machu Picchu and the Amazon with an operator we have in Peru,” says Silberstein. “We also have an experience in Lake Titicaca in Peru, where you row in Polynesian kayaks to different small towns around the lake. I had planned to do that with my three older brothers in 2020, and we had to postpone. But now we are looking forward to completing it in 2022.”

Thinking back to the young man who believed death would be preferable to life in a wheelchair, Silberstein is philosophical. “If I could go back to my younger self,” says Silberstein, “I would tell him this: Your life will look very different from what you expect—and maybe that feels like bad news to you. But even if it takes time, you’ll be able to overcome every challenge that you’ll face.”

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“The Eternal Daughter,” Reviewed: A Tour de Force for Tilda Swinton

By Richard Brody

My favorite dual role in movies—other than Charlie Chaplin ’s, in “The Great Dictator,” of course—is the mother and daughter played by Frances Farmer, in Howard Hawks’s “ Come and Get It .” I’m reminded of this by Tilda Swinton’s spectacular achievement as mother and child, in Joanna Hogg’s new film, “The Eternal Daughter” (opening Friday in theatres and on video on demand). Unlike Farmer’s roles, which are secondary to the movie’s male lead character, at least one of Swinton’s two characters is onscreen in every scene, and the movie’s few other actors are in supporting roles. “The Eternal Daughter” is very much a two-hander for one actor, an astonishing tour de force for Swinton’s art and for Hogg’s writing and direction—all the more so inasmuch as it’s a sequel, the third in a series. As in Hogg’s “ The Souvenir ” (2019) and “ The Souvenir: Part II ” (2021), Swinton plays Rosalind, the mother of a young film student named Julie Hart (Honor Swinton Byrne, Swinton’s real-life daughter). Now, in “The Eternal Daughter,” Julie returns, as a middle-aged woman (Swinton) who, in chilly late November, takes the elderly widow Rosalind (also Swinton) on a brief vacation in Wales, in a remote and majestic hotel. They are there to celebrate Rosalind’s birthday; Julie is plotting to make a movie about her mother.

“The Eternal Daughter” is a keenly discerning movie about the relationship of mother and daughter, who are bound together by a fierce love but kept apart by unbridgeable differences of character and of experience. Theatrically elaborate and nuanced, the film attains a level of hushed and whispery detail that suggests dramatic hyperrealism, as if it were made with cameras of resolution higher than the eye can perceive. Swinton’s performances are more intimate than those in any classic movie I can think of, and adorned with a dazzling array of behavioral and linguistic wisps and whorls. Yet Swinton isn’t the sole focus of the movie’s fanatically detailed attention. The hotel, a converted ancient mansion, is seemingly a character unto itself, and the only one that competes with mother and daughter for dramatic impact—because it’s haunted. For all the probing, urgent realism of “The Eternal Daughter,” the film depends not only on technical artifices—ones that make it possible for Swinton to share scenes and even images with herself—but on metaphysical artifice. It’s a ghost story.

It’s a graceful and fluid movie to watch but a difficult one to describe or even to grasp, seemingly by design. It’s mysterious, elusive, and, for all its weighty and palpable physical reality, for all its pressing concentration on its characters and their surroundings, it shunts much of the action not offscreen but to what’s in the frame but invisible—to spiritual presences that are both ubiquitous and inaccessible. Which is to say that the movie turns its metaphysical premise inside out, realizing it by means of plain special effects and simple devices—the first of which is a mere line of dialogue. As the movie opens, the two women and Rosalind’s faithful dog, Louis, are arriving by taxi to the inn; their driver (August Joshi) tells them that he avoids the hotel at night, owing to a sighting of a person in the window of an unoccupied ground-floor room. This setup—call it Chekhov’s ghost—makes surveillance of the ground-floor windows a key focus of the drama. Even apart from any awaited apparitions, though, the movie is filled with uncanny virtual presences that are invoked by the merest of banalities.

As Julie checks into the hotel, the officious young desk clerk (Carly-Sophia Davies) tells her that the second-floor room she’s reserved is unavailable—and she wants to park Julie and Rosalind in a ground-floor room instead (hint, hint). The hotel seems, however, to be completely devoid of other guests—not a single one is seen throughout the pair’s stay, and the keys for each room are still hanging in their respective slots. It’s only when, by special dispensation, mother and daughter are temporarily parked in a room upstairs that the building’s hidden souls begin to emerge, in the form of memory—and of history. Julie and Rosalind, as it turns out, didn’t select the hotel by chance. It was originally a private mansion and the home of Rosalind’s aunt, who took in Rosalind and other young relatives during the Second World War, to spare them the bombing of London. Each room that Rosalind enters, starting with the one in which they sleep, gives rise to a new round of her recollections, which she divulges to Julie with a matter-of-fact equanimity regarding even tragic and pain-filled events. Hogg’s view of the intimate gulf between the two women is essentially historical, a generation gap rooted in the incommensurable difference of the times they’ve lived in, and its decisive effect on their character, on their expectations, on their very identity.

The women fill their days and nights with minor activities, which grow increasingly charged with oddities, tensions, and perturbations that occasionally discharge a spark of creative energy. Even such trivialities as Julie’s nocturnal jaunt through empty corridors and back rooms in a vain quest for a kettle and her odd, mutually fussy interaction with the clerk the next morning to request one make the place feel off-kilter, the time out of joint. The brusque clerk is also the waitress in a formal dining room in which Rosalind and Julie are always the only diners, and where the victuals emerge promptly and tastily despite the apparent absence of any chef. Rosalind schleps to those meals a white plastic bag filled with photos, letters, and other memorabilia, which seem to serve mainly to get in the waitress’s way. Yet, amid the strangeness, the rooms and their furnishings continue to prompt Rosalind’s reminiscences—and Julie’s surreptitious recordings of them—even as the elder woman teases her daughter about eventually becoming the subject of one of her films.

Along the way, Julie encounters a friendly groundskeeper named Bill (Joseph Mydell), who shares confidences with her regarding his own memories and losses. The movie is constructed largely as dialogue-based duos, sometimes involving Bill, the unnamed clerk, or an intrusive cousin (Crispin Buxton), but mainly centered on Julie and Rosalind. The two women’s dialogue—amazingly, improvised by Swinton—is both copious and crystalline, compact and sharp, glittering and lucid. It’s not so much delivered as incarnated in extended scenes, for which Hogg devises a quietly daring array of angles, a cannily crafted framework of related physical action.

In both roles, Swinton holds the extended scrutiny of Hogg’s many and varied closeups, and her performances are perched at the delicate edge of craft—a matter of controlled gestures and calibrated diction—and sheer presence. The movie’s costumes, hair styling, and makeup have much to do with Swinton’s expansive physicality; I’ve rarely seen an actor artificially aged with such uncanny persuasiveness. At Rosalind’s formal birthday celebration, Julie’s easy, bourgeois-bohemian stylishness yields to a dressed-up, brushed-down severity that portends the strangeness of the event—which culminates in Julie’s eerie, dirgelike incantation of “Happy Birthday to You.”

That climactic sequence is capped by a plain and simple cut, from one image to another, which is among the most disorientingly audacious dramatic strokes in any recent movie. With the movie’s visual compositions (the cinematographer is Ed Rutherford) and its editing (by Helle le Fevre), Hogg develops a mastery of time that puts it outside—indeed, beyond—the mode of “slow cinema” and turns it into a tensely incremental cinema. Above all, the movie’s sense of tempo is the finest I’ve experienced in a recent film, calibrated seemingly musically, like a composition with an over-all marking of “andante” that nonetheless teems with event and agitation. Hogg’s quasi-musical sensibility yields such repetitive yet varied gestures as Julie looking out the window to watch the clerk head off, at night, into a friend’s waiting car, and glancing at herself in a recurring set of mirrors. Rosalind, too, with the stolid grace of her formalities, is given a set of repeated actions that play like variations on a theme, such as licking a finger to take a sleeping pill from an enamel pillbox or taking breakfast in bed with a distinctive posture. The insistent, motto-like recurrence of a theme from Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta” adds another element to Hogg’s cinematic counterpoint—and even the the hotel itself derives its dramatic identity above all from a visual identity built on a repetitive framework of motifs, as in the vision of flimsy curtains undulating in the breeze, the perspectives afforded by the inn’s ziggurat of staircases and landings and corridors, the vistas accessible from its various windows.

It was a surprise to learn, from my colleague Rebecca Mead’s Profile of Hogg in The New Yorker , that the décor in “The Souvenir” was exactingly devised as “an inch-by-inch reconstruction of Hogg’s elegant student digs,” because the movie does nothing of visual interest with that décor—the film is a collection of dramatic scenes acted well and filmed merely functionally, as if the mere fact of telling a personal story sufficed. The two “Souvenir” films are made on a much larger dramatic scale but are literal, amplified by little in the way of style or symbol. “The Eternal Daughter” is an entirely different kind of movie. Its chamber-music-like limits expand Hogg’s imagination and refine her aesthetic sensibility; the presence of the phantasmagorical renders her direction fanatically attentive to material details; the trickery of a dual role makes her even more alert to the intimate realities of gesture and diction; and the story’s confinement in a single building opens her speculative vision to a historical span that makes the very walls shudder with its vast implications.

The mansion-cum-inn is a limbo-like repository for memories, which, once they get in, never get out, but only fill it invisibly to the breaking point. In “The Eternal Daughter,” the inner lives of others remain closed books, and this is why there are no happy memories; the past lives on only in the deceptive and ungraspable forms of ghosts and in the mutely inanimate ones of objects and places—and, then, only in the modes of grief, guilt, and fear. With its firmly material elusiveness, the movie builds a mighty emotional complex of family tragedy, the horrors of war, the mutual incomprehension of parents and children, the unslaked anguish of married life, and the inescapable presence of the dead. Moreover, the film suggests the essential inaccessibility of this vast realm of emotion, except, somehow, at great personal and moral cost, by way of the method chosen by Julie, and by Hogg herself: in the art and the artifice of movies. ♦

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The 28th Annual Florida Tour de Force charity bicycle ride is set to kick off on Monday April 8th, 2024 in North Miami Beach, FL and end in Daytona Beach Shores, FL on Friday April 12th, 2024. The Tour is a 5-day, 270+ mile ride that averages approximately 50-55 miles each day at a moderate pace of (15-17 mph) and will pass through 8 counties including over 40 law enforcement jurisdictions.

The tour is a fully supported ride with police escorts provided by the Florida Highway Patrol, Sheriff’s Departments and local Law Enforcement Agencies throughout the state. This is an awareness ride, not a race! Breaks are scheduled approximately every 12-15 miles and the ride is designed to accommodate both novice riders and seasoned cyclists. Every year hundreds of law enforcement personnel and civilians from across the state, country, and even from around the world participate with over 100 riders completing the entire 270+ mile trek each year.

This event is organized and manned by devoted volunteers of the Law Enforcement community and all monies raised are donated to the families of Florida’s Fallen Heroes.

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The 1st Annual Florida Tour de Force Southern Leg Bicycle Ride November 10th, 2018

• From the event day, you have the weekend to ride as many miles as you can (indoor, outdoors/solo, etc.) to get close to the 277-mile mark. Use the entire month if you like, but the weekend is set for us to mark our calendars.
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Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.

From award-winning Lucía Puenzo, comes “Dive”, starring Karla Souza in a dramatic tour de force performance in this story about the complexities of relationships when set against a backdrop where winning is defined as the ultimate dream.

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• secret sauce
• sense of achievement
• stratosphere

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