Over in France, Anatomy of a Fall was already an object of controversy before most people had seen it. That’s because after Justine Triet’s courtroom drama had won the prestigious Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, the French film board passed over it and submitted Trần Anh Hùng’s food film The Taste of Things as the country’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar race. (I repeat: The Oscars’ “one-country one-film” rule is stupid.)
I haven’t seen The Taste of Things, but I have seen Anatomy of a Fall, and I have a rather dull explanation for why such a fine film was snubbed: Much of the dialogue is in English, and likely the French didn’t want to take the chance of the movie being ruled ineligible on those grounds. If you see this film as it expands to some Tarrant County theaters this weekend, it’ll leave you with some much hotter topics of discussion.
The story takes place in the French Alps, where German expat Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) carries on a successful career as a journalist and novelist while living with her family. One winter day, her 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) comes back from walking their border collie when he sees his father Samuel (Samuel Theis) lying dead from a head wound in the snow — or rather, the dog sees him first, since the boy is visually impaired. Initially it seems like a clear-cut accidental fall from the attic of their chalet, where Samuel was installing insulation. Gradually, though, the authorities start to doubt Sandra’s story that she was napping inside the house at the time and only awakened by Daniel’s screams.
The movie cadges the title from Otto Preminger’s 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder, another courtroom thriller where a trial only exposes ambiguities instead of hard truth. Just like in last year’s Decision to Leave, the investigators’ jobs are made harder by the slipperiness of the language. The judge orders Sandra to testify in French, but she often lapses into English anyway because she’s more confident in that language. English is the centerpiece of a draining half-hour sequence when the court plays audio footage of an argument between her and Samuel the day before his death that escalated into physical violence. Both the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) and the defense lawyer (Swann Arlaud) read extensive excerpts from Sandra’s novels into the record, because we are in France.
As the case takes more than a year to come to trial (again, we are in France), director/co-writer Triet takes in the noise around the proceedings as much as the trial itself. Sandra’s fight to prove her innocence encounters a hefty dose of sexism — one more time, we are in France — and the aforementioned argument has Samuel blaming her success for the stalling of his own writing career. While she’s still convinced that Samuel’s death was an accident, her lawyer tells her that their best hope of acquittal is depicting him as suicidal. Samuel’s psychotherapist (Wadjdi Mouawad) talks over her testimony and calls her “castrating,” while the prosecution dredges up her one extramarital affair to argue that she was a serial adulterer who wanted rid of her husband. A TV presenter (portrayed by the film’s co-writer, Arthur Harari) admits on the air that a famous person killing her husband makes a better story than a non-famous person killing himself.
The bombshell revelations send you running this way and that (particularly when blood spatter experts from both sides claim that their own conflicting version of events is the only one possible), and one comes from Daniel as he tries to prove his mother’s innocence by giving the dog a massive overdose of pills. The dog does a great job of pretending to be completely out of it, but the acting honors go to Hüller as Sandra bears up under pressure and refuses to play the distraught widow in public, but then breaks down when her son sends her away to have the house to himself for the weekend before he testifies. As the verdict brings the trial to an unsatisfactory end (no matter what you ultimately think of Sandra’s innocence or guilt), Anatomy of a Fall stands tall as a vivid portrait of an unhappy marriage that ends in bloodshed and the wreckage that everyone is left to deal with.
Anatomy of a Fall
Starring Sandra Hüller. Directed by Justine Triet. Written by Justine Triet and Arthur Harari. Rated R.
