An enigma wrapped in a courtroom drama

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This article was published 27/10/2023 (720 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Extremely chilly but absolutely gripping, the French film Anatomy of a Fall (in English and subtitled French) is a marriage drama wrapped in a psychological thriller wrapped in a legal procedural.

Winning this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, the film circles coolly around its enigmatic central character, Sandra (played by Sandra Hüller, known for Toni Erdmann and The Zone of Interest). Sandra is a German writer who lives with husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) — a former teacher who is also a writer — and their son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), in a fixer-upper chalet in the French Alps.

The film opens with Sandra being interviewed by a young PhD student. Sandra is being charming but evasive when their conversation is suddenly drowned out by a blaring instrumental version of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. being played on a loop. (Even if you like this song, the way it’s used in this film means it’s going to wear on you. If you don’t like it, it’s really going to wear on you.)

Samuel is on the third floor doing construction on an Airbnb suite as a way to solve the couple’s pressing financial issues, and his work seems to be passive-aggressively interrupting Sandra’s work.

The interview busts up. Daniel, a bright, sensitive kid who is visually impaired, goes outside for a walk with Snoop, the family dog. Sandra heads up the stairs. An hour later, Daniel finds his father dead, in a spreading pool of blood, on the ground outside the chalet. Samuel has fallen from a third-floor window, but it’s not clear whether it was suicide, accident or a deliberate push.

Months later, Sandra is charged with murder, and Daniel is called on as a witness.

At this point, director Justine Triet (Sybil), who co-scripted with Arthur Harari (who also happens to be her husband), really focuses, and suddenly what felt like a loose art-house look at modern relationships tightens into a twisty but carefully calibrated courtroom show.

This is a trial in which evidence doesn’t seem to bring us closer to truth. There are transcriptions, photographs, re-enactments, models and maquettes. There are Daniel’s auditory impressions of what happened, which shift over the course of the trial. There is even, at one point, literary analysis of Sandra’s work. (Only in France.)

The centrepiece for the prosecution is an iPhone recording of an argument that starts out as audio in the courtroom and then segues into a flashback in which the film viewers finally meet Samuel face to face, only for the scene to almost immediately devolve into a scorched-earth marital fight.

In this bleak, blaming back-and-forth, Samuel and Sandra argue about work, money, sex, parenting and the accident that led to Daniel losing his sight, eventually reaching Marriage Story levels of emotional ruination.

It’s revealed that the argument took place the day before Samuel’s death, but far from clinching the case, it just raises another question: is it fair to judge a long marriage by its worst moments?

The film’s English-language title seems to reference Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, a movie that was breathtakingly cynical about the limits of the legal system. In one crucial scene, Sandra tells her lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), an old friend who seems to be a little in love with her, that she didn’t kill Samuel. “That’s not the point,” he replies.

A trial is not about the truth, he says later. “You need to see yourself as others will perceive you.”

As Vincent suggests, the case is about competing narratives, and Sandra is on trial as a woman, an artist, a wife and a mother.

This is especially difficult for Sandra, who has never been concerned about whether she’s likable, a quality underlined by Hüller’s performance, which is somehow both unsettlingly blunt and emotionally guarded. The people around Sandra don’t really know who she is, and neither do we, even as the trial exposes more and more of her life and her writing.

“Your books have always mixed truth and fiction, and that makes us want to figure out which is which,” the PhD student says to Sandra at the beginning of the film. This turns out to be Triet’s warning to viewers, a signal that they will be left with an open-ended conclusion.

Anatomy of a Fall is one of those fascinating films that doesn’t stop at the end credits but will be completed, in a sense, by people hashing it out in the theatre lobby or on the car ride home.

Going against the conventional tropes of the courtroom drama, Fall is not about the triumphant revelation of some final truth, but an examination of what we do — the moral and emotional choices we make — in the face of uncertainty.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com