Old Yorker

Anatomie d’une chute

Justine Triet (2023)

This year in cinema is turning rapidly into a golden age for the on-screen marital showdown.  The one between Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan, as Mr and Mrs Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, was this viewer’s most electrifying moment at last month’s London Film Festival – though ‘moment’ is hardly the word:  the sequence was remarkable for how long its amazing momentum was sustained.  The Bernsteins’ set-to is quite short, though, beside the domestic in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, between the protagonist, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), and her husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis).  They have different surnames partly because Sandra is a successful and esteemed novelist while Samuel, despite persisting ambitions to write, is not – that’s a big part of what the row is about.  Although Triet presents much of it as flashback, bits of the dispute are heard but not seen – in an audio recording, made by Samuel without the knowledge of his wife.  The recording is being played in a court of law, where she’s on trial for his murder.

In the couple’s chalet in the Alps above Grenoble, Sandra Voyter is being interviewed by Zoé Solidor (Camille Rutherford), a young literature student writing a dissertation on Sandra’s work.  Three floors up in the attic that he calls his study, Samuel is playing loud music – so loud that Sandra eventually abandons the interview and asks Zoé to come back another time.  A short while later, Daniel (Milo Machader-Graner), Sandra and Samuel’s visually impaired son, returns from walking his guide dog to discover his father’s body outside the chalet.  Daniel cries out for Sandra, who immediately calls emergency services.  Samuel has evidently fallen from the attic balcony; there’s blood in the snow from a head wound.  His death appears to be an accident, until an autopsy reveals that Samuel sustained the head injury before his body hit the ground.

Now under suspicion, Sandra engages a lawyer, Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud), a friend from years back.  She discloses to him that, a few months previously, Samuel, who had been on anti-depressants, took an aspirin overdose; she also tells Vincent, however, that she doesn’t believe her husband’s fatal fall was a successful act of suicide.  Once he notices a bruise on his client’s arm – and even though Sandra not only explains that she got this bumping into the corner of a kitchen counter-top but demonstrates how she got it – Vincent takes the view that, if she faces charges in connection with her husband’s death, suicide will be the only defence argument that might save her.  The evidence mounts against Sandra – blood spatter analysis on a shed roof below the attic window, that audio recording made the day before Samuel died.  One year later, Sandra is standing trial.  She’s on bail but her domestic interactions with Daniel, potentially a key witness, are supervised by a ‘court monitor’, Marge Berger (Jehnny Beth).  The courtroom proceedings, interspersed with scenes in the chalet between court sessions and flashbacks, comprise most of the film’s second half.

Triet wrote the screenplay with Arthur Harari (impressive in front of the camera in another recent French courtroom drama, Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case (2023)).  As might be expected, they dispense gradually nuggets of information about the central family history.  Daniel has been partially blind since an accident that occurred when he was under his father’s supervision; Samuel’s depression stemmed from that time.  Much more recently, Sandra had a brief affair with another woman.  The couple lived in England for several years, where Samuel had an academic job and Sandra’s writing career flourished:  it was his idea they move to Grenoble to make – for him to make – a fresh start with his writing.  Samuel has good ideas that he lacks the tenacity to bring to fruition.  In the quarrel on the eve of his death, he accuses Sandra of – as well as infidelity and controlling his life – pinching one of his best ideas for a novel of her own.

Sandra is German; Samuel was French; they opted to communicate chiefly in English.  This becomes a dramatically enriching theme of Anatomy of a Fall, which contains as much English as French dialogue (and the occasional bit of German)[1].  Sandra also usually converses in English with Vincent but he thinks it crucial to her chances of acquittal that she gives evidence in French to a French court.  She does so until, frustrated that she can’t express herself clearly, she asks to continue in English, her evidence relayed to the court by an interpreter.  The film’s multilingualism is versatile:  it’s used in this instance to illustrate Sandra’s vulnerability; elsewhere, and particularly in her conversations with Vincent, to develop a texture of possible concealment – of speaking with forked tongue.

This is a long film (152 minutes) that’s unhurried yet, because it’s so compelling, speeds along.  Justine Triet and her lead actress draw you in from the word go.  As she talks with Zoé, Sandra, drinking a glass of wine, seems mildly tipsy, almost flirtatious.  The music played by Samuel intensifies those qualities until she concedes defeat and calls time on the interview.  You can well understand why someone might feel like killing the person responsible for the ear-splitting din – an instrumental cover by Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band of ‘P.I.M.P’ (those of us unfamiliar with rapper 50 Cent’s original learn at Sandra’s trial that ‘P.I.M.P’ has decidedly misogynist lyrics).  This steel-band thumper shares musical top billing with a Chopin prelude that Daniel repeatedly practises on the piano; to be honest, some of that’s a bit nerve-racking, too, but the combination of the two pieces is a highly effective use of music.

The remote, snowy setting seems to express both the unyielding gravity of Sandra’s situation and her isolation – and the acting is of a high order throughout the cast.  Until now, Sandra Hüller has been best known, internationally at least, for her role as the hapless careerist daughter in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016).  Hüller did fine work in that strange film but she’s subtler and more powerful in Anatomy of a Fall.  As her lawyer, Swann Arlaud, in another good performance, is an excellent, alert foil; he portrays very well someone taking in all he sees and hears but more selective about voicing his thoughts.  Actors delivering lines in a language that’s not their first language often don’t sound quite right but that’s certainly not the case with Hüller and Arlaud.  I don’t know if that’s because they’re fluent in English as well as first-rate actors; at any rate, their English line readings have terrific emotional precision.  Vincent is a more extrovert presence in the trial, of course.  His exchanges with the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) point up (as those between Arthur Harari’s defence counsel and his adversaries in The Goldman Case also did) the distinctive rhythms of advocacy in a French courtroom.  The British and American trial processes with which we’re so familiar on screen may be no less dependent on histrionics but opposing advocates in France interrupt each other more often.  This conveys more emphatically the impression of a continuous battle of wits, reflected in high-speed, intellectual showing off.

The argument between Sandra and Samuel on the eve of his death is constructed with great care – it’s the crowning glory of Triet and Harari’s consistently fine writing.  Samuel is spoiling for a fight long before Sandra; she knows that and tries determinedly to keep her temper.  This combination of patience and attention to detail, as well as delivering greater impact when Sandra does lose it, imparts a sense that the couple has had these arguments before, and of their established tactics.  Samuel is the film’s least rewarding role – the more we know about him, the less we think of him – but Samuel Theis can at least impress as an actor in the kitchen showdown.  I’ll have to admit I didn’t understand how Samuel managed to make this secret recording; even if this is poetic licence, though, it’s justified by the dramatic benefits.  Switching between visual flashback and what’s heard in the courtroom doesn’t at all reduce tension.  Quite the opposite:  it makes sense that it’s sound only when violence finally breaks out between the pair; it’s therefore unclear what the violence involved beyond what Sandra admits (that she threw a wine glass at the wall and slapped her husband’s face).  Differing interpretations are par for the course in courtroom drama; because they’re essential to how Triet’s film works as a whole, they seem to matter particularly in this trial – when, for example, an expert witness for the prosecution explains how the blood spatter evidence points to Sandra’s guilt and an expert witness for the defence makes just the opposite case.

With its implication of objective study, the title is well chosen:  Triet’s eschewal of melodrama gives the narrative a confounding calmness.  Just when you think the director may be too self-disciplined for her own good, a truly upsetting episode arrives.  When Daniel hears his mother refer in the trial to his father’s aspirin overdose, it rings a bell and prompts an experiment on his part:  he puts aspirin in the food of his guide dog, Snoop.  Daniel overdoes it and the animal loses consciousness.  With Sandra, by order of the presiding judge (Anne Rotger), exiled from the chalet during this last weekend of the trial, it’s Marge Berger whose quick intervention saves the dog’s life.  When Marge asks why he puts tablets in the food, Daniel, painfully distressed, recalls that Snoop was also ill, though less seriously, at the time of his father’s overdose – the result, the boy believes, of the dog’s licking up Samuel’s vomit.  Affecting as this scene is, it heralds the weakest ten minutes or so of Anatomy of a Fall.  Daniel’s evidence on the following Monday rather too decisively swings the trial in his mother’s favour.  In his testimony, the boy recalls a car journey with Samuel shortly after the latter’s overdose.  Triet shows this in flashback; as Samuel urges Daniel to accept that the people he loves will die, the father’s lips move to the words spoken to the court by his son.  This is a rare moment in the film:  it’s theatrically fancy and, as a result, relatively less effective.

Anatomy of a Fall has a few negative virtues.  It’s almost refreshing that Samuel is a weak rather than a vicious man; he may have bruised Sandra’s arm by grabbing it but he’s not much of a wife-beater, let alone a child abuser; he’s just a self-pity addict.  It’s almost a relief that Sandra and Vincent, despite their past history, don’t at any point sleep together.  Their most intimate moment comes as they celebrate, immediately after the trial, in a Chinese restaurant.  Sandra puts a hand on either side of Vincent’s face and is on the point of kissing him on the lips.  She holds this position for several seconds before deciding against the idea and, clearly to Vincent’s disappointment, removing her hands.  (This is beautifully timed.)  Sandra habitually incorporates her own experiences into her fiction but Triet doesn’t push this often-used idea so obviously as to make it tiresome.  I liked a short sequence in which Sandra, alone in a hotel room, watches a literary TV programme and hears panellists speculate that the storyline of one of her novels might be evidence of malice aforethought vis à-vis Samuel.  Even if the idea of this sequence is a cliché, the Sandra playing Sandra transcends it.  As she mechanically eats a sandwich, listening to herself being judged in the court of chat-show opinion, Sandra’s face is unreadable, except that it’s exhausted.

Among the film’s many positive virtues, Sandra Hüller’s performance ranks very high.  Although Sandra is visibly upset by Samuel’s death and by some of what happens between her and Daniel, the prevailing measured quality that Hüller gives the character is vital to Triet’s overall concept.  In one of their first interviews, as Vincent plays devil’s advocate, Sandra raises her hand to interrupt:  ‘I did not kill him,’ she says definitely.  ‘That’s not the point,’ Vincent replies.  He’s right, and not just in the sense that it’s his job to secure his client’s release.  Without being evasive, Justine Triet doesn’t resolve the question of Sandra’s guilt.  It’s a strength of the narrative that Vincent seems never quite convinced one way or the other; Sandra (as she tells Vincent) learns to recognise a look of his that betrays doubts about her innocence.  Anatomy of a Fall works on its audience patiently and persuasively:  we become more interested in what could have happened than anxious to be handed incontrovertible evidence of what did happen.  When Sandra eventually returns home to Daniel and Snoop, all we know is that her life, her son’s life and their relationship have been changed irreversibly.  The film is an unusual thing – a satisfying unsolved mystery.

16 November 2023

[1] Anatomy of a Fall looks well placed to win prizes to add to its Palme d’Or from Cannes, where the film premiered in May, but these won’t include the Best International Film Oscar:  in that competition, France has decided to be represented instead by Trần Anh Hùng’s La Passion de Dodin Bouffant.  According to Wikipedia, this decision ‘sparked controversy, with French insiders claiming that director Justine Triet was being “punished” for criticizing French President Emmanuel Macron’s repression of the pension reform protest movement during her acceptance speech at [Cannes]’.  Perhaps, but the bilingual aspect of Triet’s film may also have carried weight in the French film industry committee concerned.  The Academy’s Best International Film category was introduced in 2020, replacing the long-standing Best Foreign Language Film designation – though the change of name, politically correct as it may be deemed to be, is cosmetic:  to be eligible for consideration, a film still must be in a language other than English (though it needn’t be 100% non-English).  Submission of a British-made, not-in-English film for consideration, which happened irregularly before 2020, is standard annual practice now; and the title of the British choice for 2024, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (in which Sandra Hüller also has a major role), looks to be the only English thing about it:  the dialogue is in German and Polish.  Since English is the language of Hollywood, it’s easy, of course, for the UK to be ‘internationally’ minded, in this respect at least, whereas French sensibilities, reasonably enough, are touchy about English’s cultural imperialism.  Besides, France’s ‘Oscar committee’ may well have decided the proportion of English dialogue in Triet’s film would compromise its chances of winning the award.