The Audition

Alexander (Ilja Monti), a serious, young teenager auditions at a prestigious Berlin music school. The vote is split, but Anna Bronsky (Nina Hoss) stands up for him insisting she can train him. Her obsessive quest begins to make the boy's vocation distinct and draw out of him the unique sound she believes he possessed in his audition. However, Alexander does not respond well to her increasingly strict and regimented approach. Simultaneously, her personal life is collapsing. Her husband is seemingly aware of an affair she is having and her gifted 10-year-old musical son is disdainful towards her. She is invited to join a quintet by her colleague and lover, Christian (Jens Albinus), a promising respite, but is reluctant to perform in concert and her eventual participation leads to an exceptionally embarrassing experience. Anna is pushed over the edge and doubles down on Alexander. Come the day of his exam, events take a tragic turn.

World Premiere - Toronto International Film Festival in 2019

Nina Hoss - Winner - Best Actress Award - San Sebastian Film Festival 2019

2019

Length 99 mins

Original language: French and German

Countries: Germany / France

Original Title: Das Vorspiel

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Born in Berlin, Ina Weisse studied drama at the renowned Otto Falkenberg school, and performed in various plays. After studying philosophy, she graduated from Hamburg Film Faculty. Her final project was awarded the First Steps Award in 2002. Her debut feature film, Der Architekt, premiered at the Berlinale and won the German Television Award for Best Actress and Best Screenplay at the Max-Ophlus Film Festival. As an actress, she appeared in movies such as Das Ende einer Nacht and won the German Television Award for Best Actress, the Ganther Rohrbach Film Award and the Adolf Grimme Award. In 2016, she again won the German television Award for best actress for the films Ich will dich and Aufbruch.

Filmography

1999 Lunow (Short)

2000 On Sundays (Short)

2001 Klara (Short)

2002 Alles Anders (Short)

2008 The Architect

★★★★

"Nina Hoss gives a virtuoso performance...she is perfect casting in German director Ina Weisse's drama in which so much is left unvoiced...secrets hang in the air like a jarring, dicordant note in a concert performance.
There are few actors who can do more with just their eyes than Nina Hoss....she builds an entire charactere - angular, complex, frequently contradictory - out of flickering glances and the fretful crease between her brows"
Wendy Ide, The Observer


★★★★

"If Roman Polanski had directed Whiplash, something like this study of music's psychological cost might have resulted."
'Nina Hoss gives humane warmth to a tortured violin teacher. To Anna music is a war she can't win, a tortured servitude, her source of mastery and abnegation."
Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001) and Denis Dercout's The Page Turner (2006)...centered on pianistic cruelty. The Audition doesn't exalt this into the mad militaristic melodrama of Whiplash, or see music as explosive genius.  Instead, Weisse soberly observes its quotidian making: the office politics of bitchy colleagues, and bus rides to work as the seasons change builging Anna's Berlin world.
Nick Hasted,The Arts Desk

"The always-compelling German actor Nina Hoss (best known for Barbara and Phoenix, her collaborations with director Christian Petzold) stars as a neurotic, conflicted violin teacher and mother in this sticky, stop-start drama set in the exacting, pressurised realm of classical music."
Leslie Felperin, The Guardian

"Never before has the idea of listening to someone practice Bach held such an attraction.  It is entrhalling, like the characters Weisse has carefully created and masterly conducted."
Dan Carier, Camden New Journal/Islington Tribune/West End Extra


"Ingmar Bergman–meets–Joanna Hogg melodrama of obsession, compulsion, and self-destruction."
John Waters' top films of 2020 in Artforum


"Cunning"
"There's a special thrill in seeing an actor known for her own eerie perfectionism playing a woman who can't abide imperfection in herself or others. Hoss is one of the few actresses in Europe who can match Huppert for technical brilliance and emotional range, and she makes Anna a considerably kinder, more approachable kind of monster."
It's a showcase for a performer who erases the distinction between impeccalbe technique and raw feeling.
"Shot by the cinematographer Judith Kaufmann with a calm, stately camera that occasionally descents into flurries of agitation, the movie takes Anna apart with studied precision...allusions to her personal history have been arranged into a neat but artful psychological mosaic."
Justin Chang, LA Times

"Well-performed and crafted with the fine-tuned aesthetics of highbrow European arthouse flicks. (Nina's) razor-sharp performance passes the audition with flying colors."
Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

"Gripping, cold-blooded drama upends all manner of inspirational-educator cliche."Weisse"s own form is unobtrusively immaculate, with Judith Kaufmann's sober, autumn-toned lensing perfectly matching the stately tone of the Bach-heavy soundtrack.
The Audition is often lovely to listen to, though you can never forget the human strain behind those strings.'
Guy Lodge, Variety

"There are shades of Whiplash and The Piano Teacher in this story that centres on an off-kilter rapport between a demanding music teacher and a gifted student.'
Weisse puts her own, distinctive spin on this film, keeping the audience guessing about whose story this really is, feeling its way slowly towards a bracing, risky dramatic conclusion that suddenly reshuffles the cards we've been dealt."
Lee Marshall, Screen International

"Nina Hoss is impeccable and illuminating, and the movie's forsquare, frank, brisk approach is salutary."
Glenn Kenny, New York Times

Seen purely as a character study, this one works."
Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com

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