Maturity

Ina Weisse’s film The Audition wasn’t a box office success, as far as I know; perhaps it couldn’t have been. The story of an ambitious violin teacher pushing a student over the brink is too marginal to engage the mainstream. There are cinematographic imperfections – excessive longueurs. Yet it is a powerful film, credibly displaying a Cain-and-Abel rivalry and, at the same time, a delicate and difficult motif present in art since Antiquity: that of a mother devouring her children. It is wholesome, albeit unpleasant to be reminded that the pursuit of beauty – of perfection in beauty – can be terribly compromised; and of how imbalance in our own lives can make us make impossible demands of others. There’s an exchange that will remain with me. At one point Anna Bronsky, the teacher, hears a recording of herself playing the violin. At first she cannot recognise her own sound. Then she remarks to her husband (whom she cheats): ‘It’s rather immature.’ He replies: ‘That’s what’s beautiful about it.’ One realises: When ‘maturity’ comes to spell ‘iron control’ or even ‘loss of innocence’, it can be fatal.

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