Movie Breakdown: The Audition (Noah)

Pre-Screening Stance:

From everything I can tell from the trailer – artistically grey cinematography, sharp pangs of violin music, unsmiling German faces – this movie isn’t going to be very uplifting. Luckily, non-uplifting is totally my bag.

Post-Screening Ramble:

The Audition is a knot that no matter what shoelace you pull on, it just keeps getting tighter. It’s a suffocating, downer of a film so tightly wound there’s no space for its characters to do anything but spiral around the greyish toilet bowl of the plot. Nina Goss plays Anna, a violin teacher at a prestigious academy. Anna struggles with insecurity and anxiety and at one point an almost crippling wave of indecision. She might have been at some point a relatively up-and-coming violin player, but now she teaches other up-and-coming kids while glumly interacting with her husband and child. When Alex (Ilja Monte) – a shy, insecure teenager – becomes her newest student, for some reason, Anna starts to very incrementally fall apart. Her son, Jonas (Serafin Mishiev) – also a violin player – looks for attention and starts acting out when he doesn’t get it. Her husband might be playing abusive mind games. There is the possibility of an affair. Director Ina Weisse keeps everything regimented, everything emotionally pulled to the vest and though it echoes the intense practice one needs to be a protege of the violin, it also strips the film of any feeling. There are splashes of noise and anger and emotion, but they are quickly buried beneath the cool limbo of the film. Weisse says so little about her characters in any way, the audience is left wondering if there’s anything to be said at all.

One Last Thought:

I used to have a guitar teacher named Ken. He had a blonde mullet and would just make me play chord progressions while he soloed for 40 minutes in his mom’s basement. Yeah, that was pretty cool.