Arthouse cinema isn’t generally inclined toward “Alien vs. Predator”-style franchise mashups, but if some kind of icy faceoff were engineered between the troubled, seething music …
, violin teacher Anna Bronsky might seem more outwardly functional than Isabelle Huppert’s lonely, repressed paraphiliac Erika Kohut: In a stable middle-class marriage with a gifted son following in her footsteps, Anna seemingly hasn’t much to complain about besides her own stifled musical dreams.
From the opening scene, which sees nervous pre-teen violinist Alexander auditioning for the admissions panel at an elite Berlin conservatory, Weisse and Daphne Charizani’s original script deftly wrongfoots viewers as to just what kind of mentor Anna is.
It’s not clear exactly what she’s hoping to get out of Alexander, whose playing is promising if not prodigious, though perhaps she identifies some of her own flaws in his. Anna is plagued by a form of stage fright that cut short her music career as a young woman, which flares up again when her kindly cellist colleague Christian implores her to join his string quintet.
As it is, Anna has more than enough issues for Hoss to work through in exquisitely painful detail, in what is easily her best, most magnified performance showcase since her run of collaborations with director Christian Petzold. Hoss has a particular gift for withholding feeling on screen, letting it instead seep into her quivering, snappish body language while that face maintains its proud composure.
That said, she doesn’t go off in quite the way you might expect, in a climactic crescendo that veers into full-tilt tragedy but could afford to wallow a bit more in its elegant discomfort. Echoing a recurrent fault of Alexander’s playing, the film rushes its notes a little as it gathers momentum: Hoss, at least, is calmly credible enough to sell some pretty tight emotional turnarounds.
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