good.film
a year ago
The tragic ‘did-she-do-it?’ plot is baity, for sure, but the real hook is the supremely authentic scenes of a marriage layered with guilt, blame and blurred gender roles. It’s gripping to watch.
Anatomy of a Fall explores social causes like Family & Community, Female Empowerment & Law & Justice
Is it too reductive to say that each year, there’s that one “breakout” foreign language film that pops our mainstream media bubble and stops us in our tracks? In 2020, it was South Korea’s stunner, Parasite. Last year, All Quiet on the Western Front wowed Western audiences. Now the baton’s been irrefutably passed to Justine Triet’s complex French drama, Anatomy of a Fall.
Is it a domestic whodunit? Yes. A courtroom thriller? Also yes! But both labels actually undersell the brilliance and authenticity of Triet’s Oscar-nominated screenplay (co-written, interestingly for a movie about relationships, with her own IRL partner, Arthur Harari).
The one-liner may sound inelegant, even pulpy: a husband falls to his death from their chalet, and with no clear evidence as to why or how (did he jump, did he fall, was he pushed?), his wife becomes the main suspect. But what unfolds is actually a highly absorbing examination of guilt, blame and marital dynamics.
And the cleverest bit? We never see the wife & husband interact before his death. That’s saved for later, when a genius filmmaking conceit brings him briefly back to life - and the trial about his death morphs into a post-mortem of a couple’s private partnership.
For a film about a husband and wife who are both writers, words are key. But as it turns out, neither of them speak to each other in their mother tongue: Sandra is German, and Samuel is French. They’ve compromised on speaking English together at home - this third language serving as the couple’s ‘neutral ground’.
But it’s indicative of the tense war that’s been building between the pair: that each is giving up a piece of their ‘selves’ for each other, and that neither are 100% comfortable in their private moments. Even Daniel, their 11 year old son, speaks French - his father’s language - with his mother, deepening the notion of this ‘two sided’ family.
In this way, Triet establishes for us a sense of exhaustion and ‘otherness’ - Sandra must always navigate her way through the language of her husband and son. More importantly, it reinforces that Sandra is a foreigner, forced to battle a critical language barrier as a German in a French-speaking courtroom where she happens to be on trial for murder.
From a performance point of view, German actress Sandra Hüller seamlessly juggles the challenge, inflecting her frustrations at her lack of French fluency in the courtroom (and often switching languages mid-sentence). It’s a fantastic performance, and it’s no wonder Hüller was recognised with a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
When Sandra insists to her lawyer that she didn’t kill her husband, it’s startling to hear his weary reply: “That’s not the point.” Sandra’s about to be drawn into a legal version of theatre: where what’s ‘true’ can be reframed by a truly compelling performance. Which is her best defence? The precise truth, or an explanation that sounds more logical, more ‘real’ to a jury?
“In a trial, truth is elusive. The courtroom is where our history no longer belongs to us, where it's judged by others. It becomes fiction, and that's precisely what interests me.”
~ Justine Triet
Sandra’s lawyer warns her "You need to start seeing yourself as others will see you,” meaning, a headstrong foreign woman with something to hide. She’s unapologetic by nature, assured, defiant - qualities that aren’t naturally endearing to a jury. As a successful novelist, she’s also the main breadwinner, choosing to work while her husband Samuel puts his own writing career on hold to homeschool their vision impaired son.
Of course, these choices aren’t ‘wrong’, but in the hands of a skilled prosecutor, they can be reshaped to suggest Sandra’s mindset: selfish, uncaring, even abusive. The perception of Sandra as a wife and mother can be easily altered. What Triet is really examining is gender imbalance; the external judgement that all women navigate on a daily basis. To reinforce the point, keep an eye on the gender of the witnesses – all of those called by the prosecution are male, and those on Sandra’s side favouring the defence are female.
Complicating Sandra’s emotions further is having her son Daniel in the courtroom. Because he discovered his father’s body in the snow, he becomes the key witness in his mother’s trial, despite his grief, impairment and youth. As the prosecution pick at every wound in his parents’ marriage, Daniel learns private details that a child shouldn’t have to process. Triet keenly includes Daniel’s perspective into the narrative, juxtaposing it with Sandra's to achieve, as she describes it, “a more balanced portrayal of the events.” It’s one of the film’s most powerful dimensions.
Oh, and side note - the French judicial system appears to be fascinatingly... French. Far from the “You Can’t Handle The Truth!” interrogations we’re used to from the States, Anatomy’s proceedings are more conversational, with witnesses and even the defendant free to speak and rebut in a less structured, less rigid way. In researching French court hearings, Triet described them as “somewhat disorganised.”
It allows Triet to take a more vérité approach than the slick courtroom dramas we’ve seen before. There are deliberately unpolished moments; the camera hunts and re-focuses when a surprise witness is announced or the prosecutor crosses the courtroom. The slightly raw, shaky feel has two instant effects: it heightens the realism, and it brings us closer into Sandra’s tense emotional state.
Remember that masterstroke we mentioned, where Samuel comes ‘back to life’? It’s ghostly - but not in the way you think. It’s thanks to an audio recording, which isn’t just crucial to the trial, but the key scene in the film. Samuel was recording parts of his home life as material for a new book, and the audio he recorded the day before he died would’ve made for a bestseller: a bitter & complex argument with Sandra that’s played aloud to the courtroom.
We see the fight, but technically it’s not a flashback; this isn’t video evidence. While the audio plays and the jurors merely listen, we’re able to witness the scene as if it materialises in front of our eyes. Triet describes the effect as “creating a sense of presence, almost more powerful than the image… it's both pure presence and ghostly” (see, told you).
It’s here where Triet & Harari’s screenplay is at its most compelling. There are deeply complex layers to this marriage, and as Samuel and Sandra argue, we feel pulled between empathy for one, then the other, sometimes within seconds. In reality, it’s a negotiation, addressing the compromises they’ve made - the choice of country to raise their family, the language they speak, the sexual acts they engage in. It’s also about marital division of labour, a debate that’s still tricky to separate from gender, even for this educated, modern couple.
Triet challenges the ‘traditional’ partnership dynamic by reversing their roles: Sandra is the earner, Samuel is the carer. In doing so, she creates an imbalance that raises important questions about our ideas of equality. Do we catch ourselves empathising with Samuel because of baked-in expectations about males as primary providers - a role he’s prevented from playing? Flipping that, do we judge a mother’s choice to pursue her professional freedom over homeschooling her son? In this way, Sandra is ‘on trial’ for more than murder.
But how can any courtroom judge an entire relationship? When Sandra insists with anguish “That recording is not reality!”, she’s right. It’s a slice of time, one that doesn’t tell the full story. Triet is inviting us to examine our preconceived notions of perception, and how it can cloud the truth. What this legal system is being asked to do - listen to a dead man and his wife shouting, in an attempt to determine guilt - is impossible. But in the absence of evidence, this fraction of their lives is magnified. It’s a rich and startling scene; the very heart of the film.
“Surprisingly gripping… this family drama masquerading as a murder-mystery touches on universal marital tensions; it is both enigmatic and very human.”
- Laura Venning, Empire Magazine
“An inspection of womanhood itself, in which the ways a woman has failed to meet social or cultural expectations becomes a point of legal contention.”
- Katie Walsh, Tribune News
“Triet masterfully turns our attention from potential crime-solving to the inner workings of two imperfect people and one complicated marriage. It’s absolutely riveting.”
- Candice Frederick, Huffington Post
Fully on board, or disagree big time? We’d love to hear your take. Leave a review to share your thoughts with the good.film community!
You’ll come away from Anatomy vowing not to invest in that snowy chalet you had your heart set on after all. But there are deeper questions to this finely layered and surprisingly gripping puzzle. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide Sandra’s guilt or innocence - but the point is less about what happened that day, and more about what happened in the years leading up to it.
By exploring a couple in downfall, Triet shows how the tangled threads woven through a marriage are unpicked and scrutinised by an institution whose simple, binary result can only be innocent or guilty, with no nuance. There is only room for one ‘truth’. But like the classic tree falling in a forest, if no-one was there to see this relationship, which version of it do we believe?