Parent-child relationships are often fraught and hard to navigate. Parents often want what’s best for their child, but can often confuse that wish for their own hopes and desires. The Audition follows one such relationship. Anna Bronsky (Nina Hoss) is a violin teacher at a music-focused high school in France. Despite the opposition of all other teachers, Anna drives through the admission of a student, Alexander (Ilja Monti), in whom she detects a remarkable talent. Anna prepares him for the intermediate exam while neglecting her own family, namely her son Jonas (Serafin Mishiev). As Anna attempts to tutor Alexander, she soon finds herself trying to hold onto both her family and her own sanity.
The lives of Anna, Alexander, and Jonas all intersect in the film to create an entanglement based in loss, failure, and jealousy. From Anna’s perspective, her immediate fixation on fixing Alexander has less to do with her belief in his innate abilities and more to do with her using him as a conduit for her own issues, namely her fear of failure, the pain she still feels over losing her ability to play violin, and her failure to connect with her son Jonas. In a boy of similar age with an interest in violin, she has a chance to motivate him in the way she fails to with her son and in taking him from an average violinist to one who can compete for scholarship, she will find success through him since she can no longer attain this herself. Her hyperfocus on Alexander as a reclamation project rather than a student who needs help predictably leads her to hurt the young man rather than help, a predictable outcome of living through others vicariously. There is a fine line between tough love and cruelty which the relationship between Anna and Alexander highlights.
Inevitably, Anna’s fixation on Alexander has a residual, deleterious effect on Jonas, arousing feelings of jealousy over their relationship. Anna’s inability to get through her own issues with playing the violin and the loss of her performing career has had a devastating effect on her connection with her son, as her desire to find a conduit for her desires surrounding the violin leads to a rejection of Jonas when he displays a lack of enthusiasm for playing. Many parents struggle with allowing their children to live life on their own terms, often to disastrous results. A good parent recognizes their child’s passions and talents and tailors their parenting accordingly. Expecting your child to be a carbon copy of you leans toward the type of narcissism that fosters resentment and acting out, which Jonas illustrates as the film develops.
The Audition is a typical, quiet art house drama, featuring a good performance from its lead in Nina Hoss and a quality ensemble to back her up. The examination of a woman in crisis suffering from a loss of a loved outlet, a touch of mental illness (a restaurant scene early on seems to indicate some form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), and a desire to connect with her son but only on her terms is interesting, but not quite enthralling. Watching the train wreck slowly unfold is mildly entertaining, but nothing really happens to pull you in until the film is nearly concluded. The resolution of Anna and Jonas’ relationship and her desire for his future provides added thematic depth through its exploration of what a child’s resentment for their parent can mean for their motivations as well as the behavior, but it’s left there for you to savor rather than for the film to delve into. The Audition features many quality elements, but on the whole they don’t combine to make a lasting impression.
Image: Strand Releasing
