How can we describe the strange, ambiguous rhythms of French legal drama? Anatomy of a fall? You might think you’ve seen it all before: a woman goes to trial for murdering her husband; the little son is not sure what he saw; The audience is captivated by the “they are.” Except Anatomy of a fall completely outside these predictable parameters.
Winner of the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it tells the story of writer Sandra Voiter (Sandra Haller in a phenomenal, expressive, sphinx-like performance), who becomes embroiled in a high-profile murder case after her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), an aspiring writer, depressed, found dead near her rural home with a suspicious cut on her head.
Her visually impaired son Daniel (a wonderful Milo Machado-Graner with two piercing eyes that could drill a hole into the sun) makes a grim discovery and plays a crucial role in the impending case. The lawyer (Svan Arlo) arrives late at the crime scene and helps Sandra reconstruct in detail the events of the day.
It’s slow, exciting and completely unconventional. The film, directed by French director Justine Trieu – the second woman to win the Palme d’Or – even as its biggest questions remain unanswered. From the snowy scene of sudden tragedy to the performance of 50 Cent’s “PIMP” on steel drums and a border collie named Snoop, Triet spares no detail and carefully explores the logistics and chronology of the process. Instead of being boring, it has a grounded, intriguing realism.
The highlight of the film is the reconstruction of a bitter, decades-long marital dispute that would make Ingmar Bergman blush, played in audio in court and by the actors in flashbacks. Despite all the blame and bitterness, it is difficult to say who is responsible for such disappointments and accidents. It may be difficult to know who is responsible for something.
Anatomy of a fall As with the case below, this is a masterful exercise in looking like one thing but being something else. This is indeed a courtroom drama, but it is primarily concerned with exploring gender differences in daily rituals, misdeeds and grievances – over career, over childcare – in marriage.
And as Triet skillfully allows the audience to judge Sandra’s relative guilt, the film becomes a Rorschach test of where we stand when it comes to internalized misogyny, gendered guilt, and perhaps even when and how we choose to act on the belief of who the victim is. . and who is the culprit.
In the end, the film’s central mystery is: did Sandra kill her husband? – is both technically resolved by the conclusion and completely open to interpretation. So much so that Sandra Haller apparently asked her director multiple times if her character was guilty. The director didn’t want to tell her.