Multiple wigs to discuss here, but I will start with Julia. Obviously they Tár the fuck out of Julia throughout the film—boomer rage anti-woke rant at one of her grad students, total jokerification as Ayo’s supporters berate her outside the Beinecke, her separate apartment for cheating—but one of the best Tár allusions is when, distraught, she brings her hair all over to one side and in one fell swoop takes it from Julia Roberts wig to full-on Tár wig.
Exit Julia, enter Ayo. This wig creates a nice delineation where she has just very normal, pretty, smart girl hair out and about at department events and hobnobbing with professors, but can totally butch it up at home with the braids and the trans-masc partner. I found the little scene of them in their grad student apartment to be a charming, pleasant depiction of zillennial queer domesticity. The ending merits its own section but that wig is so perfect its so gigantic and exquisite. I’m pretty sure Kori King wore a similar unit on her season. Smart wigs for Ayo, nothing crazy, good for her.
Chloë Sevigny’s wig. What is there to say other than whoa? Hands down best moment of the film: Chloë delivers her big monologue and establishes herself as the one person capable of thinking beyond themselves and accessing a little empathy, Julia storms off, Chloë hears a second Smiths song play (after previously commenting “Is this Morissey?” “Do these kids really like this?”) and just says something like “More Smiths? fuck yeah.” Chloë in that crazy ass wig sipping her big globe of red wine listening to the smiths in a Yale dive bar, if it was all for nothing at least we got this.
New Haven Local Flavor
There is high comedy hidden throughout this film for those familiar with the Nutmeg State, particularly our beautiful (hehe) New Haven. Yes, much of the film is filmed in Cambridge (UK, not Mass.) and you can tell. Not a lot of brick at Yale but I am choosing to overlook. The best CT moment (for me) is Julia requesting Ayo meet her for a very dramatic exchange wherein Ayo takes an Uber to… a frontage road between I-95 and the Long Island Sound lined with various latin food trucks and (if you’re lucky) the one Thai food truck with the green curry. Which I guess is also near where Julia’s clandestine wharf-front apartment is located. Upon recognizing the location I couldn’t help but wonder, was Andrew Garfield sustaining himself off the food trucks whilst hiding out in Julia’s apartment? Her Tár Cheating Apartment (TCA) is in fact just across the interstate from IKEA and the big beautiful cantilevered brutalist office building, we love Luca.
The Implications of an Android Phone
One has to wonder why Julia has an Android and why she’s using this horrid default messaging app that’s all white and orange, blue and green. ew. As essentially a lifelong Android user I need to know what is going on here. There is always an implication when a character is given an Android due to the ubiquity of the iPhone and, to me, an added implication when said character is given a totally dumpy old Android. What does having an Android mean? Does she have some philosophical or moral opposition to Apple? Doubtful. Is she a total privacy freak? Also doubtful, far too old and non-techy. She didn’t come to the platform for its wealth of customization options, that much is clear. And she can definitely afford the iPhones
All this brings us to the fabled rule of smartphones in movies— “Villains can’t have Iphones.” Yet another way in which she’s Táred in the film. No clear answers on what secrets this detail reveals about Julia’s character. That said, it merits a section just to bring up the semiotic problem of Androids and for me to bitch about the ugly phone UI. Not nearly as ugly as the AI/phone footage in The Shrouds (2024) which was actually brilliant. The total ugliness and depressing verisimilitude of the AI chat bot and close-up smartphone footage was actually totally revelatory. Big ups to Cronenberg, we love the ‘Berg. Don’t need to veer off too much here but needless to say I’m sure the Android phone is the real cipher for the film’s deep esoteric messaging.
Is it Kino?
There was at least one totally Park-Chan-Wook-ian transition in the film but some nice cinematographic choices throughout, Luca having some fun setting up kino moments which we love to see. One part, no idea what the transition was in After The Hunt (it ends with an overhead shot of the plaza outside the Beinecke) but it reminded me of Joint Security Area (2000) when they go from an overhead of the hexagonally-roofed lookout tower to the Swiss detective woman’s umbrella (1:22:52). Not quite the level of Ana de Armas getting fucked on that bed in Blonde (2022) and the sheets turn into Niagara Falls (0:42:48) but still kino, loved it yay Luca. The hand-ography was beautiful, Luca has such a thing for physicality and playing off closeness and distance. He’s good at what he does and it’s just nice to trust the person driving the train and relax. I really advocate for blind Luca stanning, feels so good to have him as my big gay maypole to skip around and smile and have a laugh. Yayyy Luca.
The part where After The Hunt (2025) is compared to Lost Highway (1997)
Andrew Garfield and Fred Madison, sure. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, so by extension we also construct delusional fantasies in order to live after committing heinous crimes. When Garf initially constructs his defense / denial with Julia in that sumptuous Indian diner (?) it’s obviously cobbled together and rushed and he’s piling on when he thinks things work, really he’s riffing. When he kind of reintroduces his thesis to a scorned Julia in her TCA there is a bubble created where you’ve been through it so much that you start to buy the Garfield thesis for a little bit. Of course this bubble immediately pops as he starts to, in ATH-ese, cross a line with Julia. But for a little bit you get this internally coherent bubble that is not really what you want but it is at least a story to cling to. Of course, the great strength of the film is that the MeToo stuff is totally secondary and muddled and (surprise, surprise) the film is more about human nature (cynical.)
Andrew Garfield Fat Cock (Sorry)
Andrew Garfield was very hot in this movie. I know his character is accused of sexual misconduct but (it’s a movie and) there’s no way to get around it. I saw pictures of his hair from the movie on X and rogaine bros were being all “Am I cooked?” “What’s his routine? How do I get this?” I enjoyed this thoroughly and the hair is major for me in this film, even if it is natural and not a wig (which I’d obviously prefer.) Sartorial choices for Garf are S-tier. Totally gooning over his rugged intellectual vibe and how much he futzes with his big sweater and his shirtsleeves at that Indian diner. Overall, wonderful clothing very Double RL. Needless to say could use a bit more meat on the bones but lets clap it up for Luca for the scene of Julia finding him in her TCA, lazy boxer moment— I cannot be going on about him at length like this.
Bourgeois Interiors
The production design here was really beautiful and the Ivy-Chic costuming was perfect. Films set in rooms with things and people in clothing are becoming rarer as the movieverse gets increasingly Wicked (2024.) So many moments where someone would enter the scene or the camera lingers on some object and you just smile as this little world fills out. The big butcher block kitchen, ridiculous gay husband making cassoulet in a tasteful Staub dutch oven, the posters for the recent(ish) Metropolitan Opera production of Akhnaten (1983.) Things like these appear and I am in the theatre just grinning like an idiot resisting the urge to slap my hands together like a seal. It’s gorgeous bourgeois domesticity: HGTV cinema, perfected by Luca in Call Me By Your Name (2017) but once again done beautifully here transposed to a less idyllic but still thoroughly mythologized interior world.
I cannot neglect a good Lost Highway (1997) comparison here, as the Julia-Stuhlbarg home and its Bourgeois Interiors do a lot of heavy lifting in setting these characters up as do the metrosexual environs in the Fred-Renee household. Fred and Renee’s cold abode is sparsely furnished with conceptual art-object furniture and dark abstract painting (all by Lynch) while Julia and RidiculousGayHusband have a free flowing floor plan (for entertaining, naturally) and deliciously on the nose New-England-Professorial furnishings.
Nietzsche Mentioned
I feel obligated to include that Herr Nietzsche is mentioned by name right at the beginning of the film. Michael Stuhlbarg describes Nietzsche as “essentially a proto-nazi” or whatever but he’s a psychologist and ridiculous gay husband so obviously we can disregard. Water off a ducks back. If you read a little Nietzsche he’s always bitching about nationalists and anti-semites, not to say he doesn’t have... interesting ideas about Jews. It’s one line, don’t need to make a big section out of this but it does allow a good opportunity to mention that the script is: not so good. There is some bad writing, but Luca is a studio director who mostly does adaptations so I choose not to dwell on this too much. Either way, get those Kaufman translations out and read those footnotes honey.
After the Hunty Stunty (Yes God)
The Ending (Luca’s Version.) I’m obsessed with this ending. Five years later.
Julia is now chair of the department, despite being personally protested by students and committing medical fraud (or something) by stealing Chloë’s prescription pad. Julia half watches the news of the LA wildfires and Meta’s termination if its DEI program in her spacious wood paneled office. Meanwhile in the real world it’s the second Trump term, MeToo has been totally supplanted by the Genocide as the defining Campus Issue™, and the president of the free world is the most unsuccessfully MeToo-ed person on earth (working off the ratio of allegations:consequences.) This really gets the film’s attitude as kind of an anti-issue-piece issue-piece.
The interaction here is to die for. These women are going to “Grab A Drink” and yet in the course of the interaction, Julia has sat down with a glass of wine at the Indian diner (insane location, so not a bar or even a restaurant that would have a liquor license) and Ayo never orders, never drinks anything, just does some cunty dialogue and leaves. It’s so beautiful to see these two women totally done up in their final evolutions just talking past each other and then parting ways with truly nothing having happened.
Total Real Housewives cultural victory.
The Woody Allen Question
This is more of a comment than a question. Starting with the signature Woody Allen serif typeface (Windsor) was a delicious choice and really sets the tone for a kind of meaningless movie about people in lovely, lived-in environments having quick smart-stupid dialogue. Beginning with white-on-black Windsor typeface and ending with someone yelling “cut!” is like having a big light up marquis stating “This is a movie, you’re watching a movie.” I’d hate to over-intellectualize this film (obvious lie) but this maneuver is very Brechtian, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and it’s a nice excuse to ignore some of the bad writing.
This, to me, is what most people are missing about this film. If you take it on face value you end up with the letterboxd-brain “ Tár from Temu” perspective. If you focus on this framing instead, the film can be read as meta-commentary on the impotence of MeToo and the persistence of self-interest/self-preservation even when coded in a language of higher ideals and speaking truth to power (the anti issue-piece issue-piece.) In this way it is very successful, regardless of the writer’s or Luca’s intentions.
ATH is meaningfully differentiated and I don’t want to harp on the similarities but Tár makes some similar subversive moves where the misconduct at the center of everything is totally omitted and merely gestured to so you can either choose to downplay it or fantasize wildly about some grand Epsteinian conspiracy by Tár. ATH makes this same maneuver (“crossed a line”) and, similar to Tár, there is no grand climax of justice and retribution. Unlike Tár where our protagonist is punished by being relegated to a comically mediocre stature conducting video game music for cosplayers in South East Asia, ATH is set some years later and Julia is not even the direct center of the conflict so she emerges totally unscathed and even manages to ascend to chair of the department. Ayo ending up working for Rolling Stone is also a totally perfect thwarting of expectations because she is supposed to be the principled one but her flight out of academia doesn’t see her at a serious journalistic outfit (haha) but at the premier payola rag in American media. A publication which only enters the conversation when they come up for air from sucking off T***** S**** (payola) and decide to shit out some culture war piece that generates a lively but brief discourse cycle.
I also read (heard on a podcast) that the original ending had Julia testifying of behalf of Ayo, thus providing the climactic triumph of justice, but of course Luca got his red pen out and delivered us the real associate professors of New Haven (everyone say ‘Thank you Luca.’)
To return to Woody Allen (sorry), it’s worth noting this is a story revolving around philosophy scholars that love to lounge about pontificating and debating classic moral “how should a person be?” (love Sheila Heti) questions of philosophy. Yet, when confronted with a situation that actually demands some of this higher thinking and consideration, the philosophy is totally out the window and everyone is looking out for #1. This kind of pseudo-intellectualism that becomes pure set dressing as the characters reveal themselves to be increasingly self-interested is very Woody Allen (see: Bananas (1971)) and justifies the plainly referential Windsor typeface.
