Hearing: The face of confusion | Culture

Since then, and as a conservatory teacher, never as a successful concert performer, she turned her desires, her realities of triumph on her son. To the excess. The magnificent German actress Nina Hoss plays this complex woman to exhaustion, and what she does, truly powerful, elevates the film at all times, beautiful in many sections, to a final stretch, however, much more debatable by drifting than Take the story. Hoss, former aequo winner of the best actress award at the San Sebastian festival, must say it all with her face because she hardly has texts to develop. And always look, scrutinize, from his cruel uncertainty, from his disturbed confusion. Loaded with records.

The portrait of Weisse, also a co-writer, unfolds in various aspects, and all of them are interesting: together with a husband who puts calm and common sense, but never affection and even less passion; with a lover with whom there is no direct communication with eyes and guts, but with sex; next to a son whom he presses with the dissatisfaction of failure; next to a young student in which the illusion that he has already lost with his stem turns over; with an elderly and violent father, always to the frenzy for the greatest trifle with his old mother. With hardly any explanation, this psychological drama but never a psychologist advances between Weisse's good taste for filming and editing, and the fierce defense of his character by Hoss.

With a beautiful (and very adequate) photograph, especially in dimly lit, almost gloomy interiors, The audition it also sits with good judgment in the narrative formula of the abrupt cuts of the sequential continuum. It is gushing, and it never flows naturally because in no way should it flow: the narrative becoming of the film is choppy, like the life and mind of its creature.

However, when the final zone arrives, after the accident, the magnetism of the story cracks. For the fact itself, forced, tremendous, and for the consequences in its outcome. It is then that it is possible for the viewer to ask the question of where the director wants to take him, what he is trying to say. And it is not that the guideline is ambiguous; is that it is confusing, between congenital coldness and the sickly pursuit of perfection.