Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
dir. Justine Triet
Rated: R
image: ©2023 Le Pacte
The key sequence in the procedural courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall is indicative of director Justine Triet’s masterful storytelling for what it doesn’t show us. The man who suffers the fatal titular fall, Samuel, made a surreptitious audio recording of a vicious argument between he and his wife, Sandra, that ultimately turns physically violent.
As the jury hears this altercation, Triet allows us to see what they can’t. She stages the heated exchange as a flashback, but only the portion where words are used as weapons. Before the first slap is doled out, Triet cuts back to the courtroom. We experience the physical violence between Samuel and Sandra as the jury does, who can only hear the wordless scuffle with no way of knowing who is doing what to whom.
It's a good metaphor for the fact that anyone on the outside of a romantic relationship can never really know what’s going on within it. Triet uses this ambiguity again and again throughout her 152-minute opus to make us question our own assumptions and to confront the fact that, as one character puts it, when you can’t know the absolute truth about a situation, you must decide what to believe based on what’s true for you.
Anatomy of a Fall, which, because of the title, one can’t help but compare to the extraordinary 1959 Otto Preminger courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder, also never shows us the moment at the heart of its story. Triet leaves plenty of room for speculation and doubt about what has occurred: an accident, a suicide, or a murder. The film is beautifully shot – cinematographer Simon Beaufils’s stark photography captures the crisp white snow of the Southeastern French setting beautifully – and offers up enough uncertainty that you continue to puzzle over the particulars long after its final frame.
Ultimately, Anatomy of a Fall is about layers. The film begins with an interview. Sandra is hosting a local college student who wants to interview the successful author about her novels and writing process. Barely five minutes into the interview, the pair are forced to cut it short with plans to reschedule. Samuel is renovating the third-floor attic of his and Sandra’s isolated mountain chalet, and he begins playing a song on a loop – a steel-drum laced instrumental cover of rapper 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. – so loudly that the two women can’t continue.
It’s clear that Samuel is purposefully trying to derail his wife’s interview. The first layer is peeled back.
The couple’s teenaged son, Daniel, decides to take his guide dog, Snoop, for a walk after the student interviewer leaves. Daniel, we’ll soon learn, was partially blinded in an accident years ago. According to Sandra, Samuel blamed himself for what happened to their son. Another layer is peeled away.
When Daniel returns from his walk, he discovers his father’s dead body, his blood luridly splashed on the stark white snow. The boy calls to his mother, who rushes outside as the deafening P.I.M.P. cover continues to blare from the attic.
In the aftermath of the police’s initial inquiry into what Sandra claims must have been an accident, she contacts an old friend, Vincent, who is a lawyer. The police aren’t buying the accident theory, and they eventually arrest Sandra on suspicion of murder. When Vincent, who takes his friend’s case, tells Sandra that the accident theory is likely a losing one for her, she admits to him that Samuel had attempted suicide six months prior. One more in a growing succession of layers is revealed.
Triet – who cowrote the screenplay with her romantic and professional partner, Arthur Harari – expertly guides us through these intricate layers of a marriage marred by recriminations, jealousy, and guilt. The director, whose film won the Palme d'Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, making her only the third female director ever to win the honor, plumbs the depths of decades of a shared life that ends in tragedy.
Even the elemental fact of what languages the lovers speak goes under Triet’s microscope. Sandra, a German, and Samuel, who is French, both speak English as a way to meet in the middle and to give their son a consistent sense of family identity. The fact that Sandra struggles with fluency in French becomes a point of contention during the trial as she slips into and out of English while giving testimony.
Because Daniel has no one else to care for him, Sandra is allowed to be released during the trial, but an impartial court monitor, a woman named Marge Berger, is assigned to stay with Sandra and Daniel so that the defendant can’t tamper with a key witness, her son. Sandra is instructed to only speak French to Daniel, so Marge can ensure that Sandra doesn’t influence his testimony.
Movies aren’t real life, so I can’t be sure how much fidelity Anatomy of a Fall has to the actual French court system, but I was struck by how much the trial differed from what I know about American court procedures. Throughout the trail, during direct and cross-examination of witnesses, the judges and attorneys allow for questions to be asked of Sandra. Assuming that Triet was meticulous in her depiction of a French murder trial, it was fascinating to see how the process is much more free-flowing and organic than that of my home country.
For me, movies are a way to experience the world and to understand humanity from as many different perspectives as possible. Anatomy of a Fall gave me an invaluable glimpse into the justice system of another country.
In the picture, Triet mostly eschews the rule of thirds to put the subject of any given shot squarely in the center of the frame. This gives the majority of Anatomy of a Fall an “official record” feel, which is reinforced with sequences that feel like news coverage, alongside the director’s mix of more traditional cinematic shots.
Sandra Hüller, whose breakthrough year includes appearing in two Oscar Best Picture nominees – Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest – deftly keeps us at a remove in order to keep us guessing at what really happened involving that third-story window. That probably wasn’t completely up to the actor. She repeatedly asked her director throughout the shooting of the movie if her character was guilty or not, and Triet steadfastly refused to answer.
That helps with the verisimilitude the movie produces in regard to real-life high-profile murder trials; in the film, two completely contradictory views, from experts on each side of the case, are offered on the blood spatter on the side of a shed near where Samuel died. (Triet has spoken about her fascination with the infamous Amanda Knox murder trial.)
Fifteen-year-old Milo Machado-Graner is exceptional as Daniel, a sensitive soul who is devastated by this tragedy. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the real hero of the movie, Snoop, played by a seven-year-old Border Collie named Messi. Snoop is central to one of the movie’s most harrowing sequences, in which Daniel decides to test a theory that will allow him to make up his mind about what happened before giving his testimony in court. (While watching Anatomy of a Fall, my wife, Rae, mentioned that Snoop (or rather, I suppose, Messi) should definitely be given an Oscar for the performance. As much as I’d love that, the last thing we should do is create an Oscar category for animals. Can you imagine the tortures that animals would endure at the hands of their human handlers in pursuit of Oscar gold?)
During the opening credits of Anatomy of a Fall, we see myriad pictures of the once happy couple. It’s one side of a whole life that we explore over the course of the movie. At one point, Sandra remarks that the audio recording of the fight that the jurors heard is “not reality.”
That’s both true and it’s not. It’s one piece of the reality in a larger mosaic of a shared life that is impossible to comprehend all at once. No person is only one thing, as the saying goes, and no relationship is either. Triet’s triumph is in unlocking as much as she can in one relationship over the course of her film. The result is complex and satisfying even as it leaves you with more questions than answers.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Anatomy of a Fall is a thoroughly compelling courtroom drama. Even though it clocks in at a hair over 2.5 hours, it feels half that long, because you get caught up in Triet’s engrossing storytelling.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- There’s a fascinating camera move during the sequence in which Daniel gives his testimony. The camera quickly pans back and forth, pivoting on the young boy’s face as he confronts a barrage of questions from both the defense and the prosecution.
- I initially wrote about Anatomy of a Fall as part of a winter 2023 review round up. Every year my goal is to write about each Oscar Best Picture nominee, so I decided to go back and write a proper, full-length assessment, hence this review. You can find my earlier, truncated reaction here.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I screened Anatomy of a Fall via a FYC screener disc. The film is currently available in limited theatrical release, and to rent or buy on most streaming platforms.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard about the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision finding that human embryos created as part of IVF treatments have full personhood rights. Predictably, multiple health centers that provide IVF services have halted any such services, because the destruction of such embryos could be cause for murder charges.
My home state of Texas is determined to one-up the Alabama Supreme Court’s draconian and theocratic decision. Seventeen Texas GOP members are backing a bill to outlaw abortions, IVF, IUDs, and some forms of birth control.
These people are nuts, and they will not rest until they have crammed their insane religious beliefs down their subjects’ throats. (Note, I did not use the word “citizens,” but rather “subjects,” because that is how these Christian nationalists view the population over which they reign.)
You can read more about this latest attempt to criminalize normal health care here.