Summary
The film is a lesson in how marital and family problems (and of any kind) should not always be raised by screaming cinema or through marathon parliaments; of how crises coexist with everyday life. Nina Hoos (in another of her enormous performances) is one of those actresses who are ideal to also convey what is not said. Thanks to all that, her violin teacher and violinist is a more complex character than she initially seems.
Review:
Anna Bronsky (Nina Hoos) is a violin teacher at a music academy in Berlin. Against the opinion of other colleagues, she admits young Alexander (Ilja Monti, violinist in real life) as a student in order to prepare him for an audition. From this meeting, some changes will be triggered in Anna's personal environment and in herself.
The characters in Ina Weisse's film don't talk much; her actions, her gestures are explained by more. The skill and subtlety (and frankness) with which, through a few strokes, the situation of Anna's ties with her luthier husband, her pubescent son who also studies violin, her colleagues, her father and her student are remarkable; we see how the state of affairs also responds to other situations that are revealed and the way in which it does. That relationship with the violin appears as a teacher and as a performer "that she no longer plays" and the possibility of returning to this role. Alexander acts as a projection of the best of Anna and perhaps the worst as well; Not for nothing does the original German title (Das Vorspiel) mean prelude. Music as a discipline (sometimes cruel) clearly refers to discipline as a family history and as an eminently German topic and music as a means of relating to other people.
The film is a lesson in how marital and family problems (and of any kind) should not always be raised by screaming cinema or through marathon parliaments; of how crises coexist with everyday life.
Nina Hoos is one of those actresses who are ideal to also transmit what is not said; for them her Anna is a more complex character than she initially seems. On the other hand, it is remarkable the dry way with which Weisse cuts his scenes and correctly introduces the diegetic presence of classical music throughout the plot, a powerful resource that seems obvious in the cinema about musicians and music but that many times it is not well used.
