Martin Scorsese: The 'clouds lifted' for the future of cinema when I saw 'TÁR'

The belle of the ball at Wednesday night's New York Film Critics Circle awards was "TÁR," which won Best Picture and Best Actress honors, Cate Blanchett. Todd Field's gripping epic about the downfall of a Berlin Philharmonic conductor still has a long way to go before the Oscars, but the film has a fan whose appreciation will count: Martin Scorsese.

While the night was light on star power compared to last year's Best Actress winner Lady Gaga, the event at the TAO in midtown Manhattan felt like a comeback for a block of critics known for mixing mainstream commercial fare (Best Cinematography winner "Top Gun: Maverick") with potentially more challenging arthouse fare (Best International Feature Film "EO" winner, for a , as well as Best Director winner S. S. Rajamouli, whose Indian epic "RRR" is about as accessible as any recent foreign-language release).

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Cate Blanchett gave a hilarious speech when accepting the Best Actress award, praising director Field as "the most inventive collaborator I've ever met" and "a director like no other." She said that "Todd is the kind of director you go on a hike with, and he would warn you that you almost certainly encounter a bear, and there's a good chance you'll lose a limb or part of your face, and do you find yourself really turned on. Bear? Fuck yeah!"

But the highlight of an evening in which Todd Solondz also presented the award for Best First Feature to "Aftersun" director Charlotte Wells was undoubtedly the unexpected appearance of Scorsese awarding Best Picture to "TÁR". There's no better imprimatur these days than the impassioned words of the man who, when he last took the stage in New York, called the obsession with box office numbers "repulsive ". ("TÁR" is light on those, with just $5.6 million at the box office so far, but whatever.)

“For so long now, so many of us have seen movies that let us know where they are going. telling us that everything will be fine in the end," Scorsese said. "Now it's insidious, because you can rock it and eventually get used to it. Driving those of us who have known cinema in the past – much more than that – to despair of the future of this art form, especially for the younger generations. »

He continued, "But those are the dark days. The clouds lifted when I saw Todd's movie, 'TÁR'. What you did, Todd, is that the very fabric of the film you have created does not allow it. All the aspects of cinema and film that you have used testify to this. Moving places, for example, moving places alone does what cinema makes of better, that is to say, to reduce space and time to what they are, that is to say nothing.

"You make us exist in her head. We only experience through her perception. The world is her. Time, timeline and space become the music that brought to life. And there's no telling where the movie is going. We're just following the character on his weird and heartbreaking journey to his even weirder final destination. Now what you've done, Todd, is a real act of high aerobatics, because it's all conveyed through masterful staging, in the form of controlled, precise, dangerous, rushed angles, and geometrically chiseled edges in a sort of wonderful 2:3:5 aspect ratio for the frames compositions.”

Finally, Scorsese said, "The limitations of the frame itself and the provocation of measured long takes all reflect the brutal architecture of its soul - the soul of 'TÁR'."

See the full list of New York Film Critics Circle winners here.

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