Star cast: Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner
French director Justine Triet’s legal thriller Anatomy of a Fall begins right at the precipice of the death that defines the rest of the story. Successful novelist Sandra (Hüller) is being interviewed by a young, star-struck female PhD student who’s smitten by her fiction, which has always been semi-autobiographical. The novel they’re talking about fictionalizes Sandra’s son Daniel’s accident, the incident that left him with blindness due to a damaged optic nerve. Soon, Daniel will discover his father Samuel’s corpse outside the remote mountain cabin they live in. But for now, our attention is firmly with Sandra and her admiring interviewer. “For you to start inventing,” the young woman says to Sandra, “you need something real first. You say your books always mix fact and fiction. It makes us want to figure out which is which. Is that your goal?” While we never see Sandra responding directly to this question, its significance only increases as the rest of this deliciously ambiguous story plays out.
The most impressive thing about Anatomy of a Fall is how it commits fully to the genres it is invested in (the police procedural, the courtroom thriller and so on) while also using genre beats to reveal the subterranean grievances and neuroses of a seemingly normative, nuclear family. In director Justine Triet’s skilled hands, Sandra and Samuel’s marriage becomes a passive-aggressive tinderbox. Layer by layer, clue by clue, the screenplay peels away the façade to reveal the fault lines in their relationship. Samuel, a writer and former academic who struggles with perennial writer’s block, is clearly resentful of his wife’s success as a novelist. Sandra in turn blames him for their son Daniel’s blindness—on the day he suffered that terrible accident it was Samuel who was supposed to pick him up from school (but he didn’t, choosing to leave the task to a babysitter).
The film is in constant conversation with the audience’s expectations from a whodunit or from a courtroom thriller. If a jury trial is essentially a spectacle, it must follow that this spectacle has a designated ‘crescendo’. And if this is so, what might this crescendo look like and what does that mean for Sandra and Daniel? In one of the film’s most hard-hitting scene we are shown a flashback where Samuel and Sandra are fighting viciously, escalating to fisticuffs. We see the usually even-tempered, soft-spoken Sandra as someone capable of physical violence when pushed to the edge, but does it change who we are “rooting for” in the story? Is there even such a thing as “rooting for” a side when we are presented with two deeply flawed, abrasive individuals? Or are these attitudes little more than narrative crutches for the simple-minded? Triet seems to be preoccupied with questions like these, even as the whodunit part of the story takes centre-stage in the second half.
The performances in Anatomy of a Fall are nothing short of exceptional. Sandra Hüller, who has also been widely praised for her role as the “Queen of Auschwitz” in the recent Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, turns in a steely-eyed performance of rare restraint and aching humanity. Whether you see her as blindsided victim or ice-cool perpetrator, she aces every test before her with flying colors and in fact, holds the film together when it threatens to get too wrapped up in its own rhetoric flourish. Swann Arlaud is every bit as effective as Sandra’s lawyer and longtime friend, who might just be harboring a crush on her. And youngster Milo Graner shows a frankly scary level of emotional maturity and subtleness in his expressions—there’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever that he’s destined for great things. A brief word, also, for the very well-behaved and lively husky (or malamute?) who plays Daniel’s guide dog Snoop; as you will discover in the second half, Snoop plays a very important role in the legal proceedings as well.
As a writer, some of my favorite moments included the one where an incredulous Sandra is shocked at the prosecution quoting her novels back to her on the witness stand—she is rightly shocked at the proposition that a writer needs to “defend” opinions and viewpoints expressed by her characters within a work of fiction. That initial question about fact and fiction comes home to roost, truly, for Sandra and she, like the rest of us, are unsure where one ends and the other begins.
Rating: 4 (out of 5 stars)
Anatomy of a Fall is playing in cinemas
