Tár and Marcel the Shell With Shoes On are basically the same film

2022 is over and over, but the best-of-the-year lists are still being released as cinephiles catch up on everything they missed in a year that saw great films scattered across every release platform imaginable. Two films that are highly ranked many of these year-end lists: Todd Field’s 158-minute epic, warehouseabout the rise and fall of a fictional conductor (played by Cate Blanchett, who is almost guaranteed an Oscar nomination for best actress for the role) and Dean Fleischer-Camp’s quirky little ditty Marcel wears the shell with shoes ona feature length extension by some YouTube oddities that went viral 12 years ago.

One of those films is a dark, much-analyzed drama about a world-famous, sexually manipulative, morally questionable woman in a career that rarely acknowledges women. The other is about a cute, lonely clam with googly eyes. But oddly enough, they turn out to be pretty much the same movie, except for a few little details like “tone” and “intent” and “scope” and “execution” and all that stuff. Look at the parallels:

• Both films revolve around sensitive, fussy, idiosyncratic creators who express their personalities through music, being very precise and refusing any outside opinion or interference in their work.
• Both protagonists are estranged from their families and try to advance their lives with the help of non-family members.
• Both Marcel and Lydia Tár turn to assistants for that support, and then make the mistake of believing that those assistants are more personally invested in them than they actually are. In the end, both assistants rebel against the emotional needs of the protagonists.
• Both protagonists spend a lot of screen time being interviewed by real-life journalists – Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker in Lydia’s case, 60 minutes‘ Lesley Stahl in Marcel’s case.
• Both protagonists need the media’s cooperation and collaboration to achieve their goals, but both find the side effects overwhelming, problematic, and not easily controlled. Both find that their fame gets them unwanted attention from opportunistic people.
• In both cases, her assistants secretly film them and circulate the video online, where it goes viral and causes a huge explosion.
• Both experience a devastating loss, and both respond by falling into a paralytic depression and withdrawing from everyone they have previously been in contact with. Both seek simplicity by retreating to the basics of their past lives.
• Both eventually reunite with their estranged families.
• And at the end of their films, both express the end of their emotional paralysis by making music for other people. Both films end with a performance where the protagonist picks up music again in front of a rather strange looking audience.

So there you have it – absolutely no meaningful difference between warehouse and Marcel wears the shell with shoes on. In summary, both films have the same basic message: artists are difficult to work with the media, and the audience is worst of all. Strange that we needed two films about the same thing in one year.

But hey, think of the time we got Armageddon and Deep Impact, two action blockbusters about asteroids threatening Earth in the same year? It is exactly like that. Perhaps we should revisit both films to see if they bear any resemblance to Marcel and warehousealso.