Anatomy of a Fall

Did she do it? For most of Justine Triet’s absorbing Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d’Or and has garnered five Oscar nominations, we hope she didn’t, but we’re never sure. “She” is Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), a novelist born in Germany but, until recently, living in France with her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis). Samuel, it appears, has fallen from an attic window to his death on the snowy ground below. But did he fall or was he, uh, guided? Accident, suicide, or homicide? And does any of this truly matter? Is our fascination with courtroom dramas leading us to look in the wrong direction?

The script, by Triet and her partner Arthur Harari, is an anatomy of something, all right. A mere murder mystery is not on the agenda; the mystery here is the deeper mystery of relationships, how they start, how they endure or fail. Nevertheless, I came to develop a sharp empathy with Sandra’s lawyer and former lover, the graying and mordant Vincent (Swann Arlaud), who knows that it doesn’t matter if his client did it or not, but if he can convince a judge of her innocence. She does not make it easy for him. Nobody in this family is easy, not even Sandra’s young son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), who is almost blind from an accident incurred when Samuel was supposed to be watching him. His near-blindness, though, is not what makes him difficult.

In someone else’s hands, when a bit of family drama falls into the legal thriller you’d been expecting, or when courtroom struggles interrupt the family drama you’ve been enjoying, the result might be frustrating. But Triet weaves the two threads together delicately, so that they feel like an organic whole, yet with the two sides occasionally commenting on each other. The argument we hear between Sandra and Samuel, which he secretly recorded and saved onto a USB stick, sounds authentically awful and hurtful, and neither party comes off at all well, which is usually how these things go. But does it mean anything? What, if anything, does it say about motive? And why do both the prosecutor and Vincent sound as though they’re arguing beside the point? The prosecutor’s arguments are grounded in logic, but when are people ever logical?

In this case, so many resentments have built up on both sides, born of insecurity, that when husband and wife look at each other what they see is their own frailty. Anatomy of a Fall uses the legal mystery as a launchpad to scrutinize the people onscreen, who often don’t act according to their best interests — even Daniel has his unrelatable moments, conducting a dangerous experiment on the family dog. (The dog comes through fine; the incident is set up to prove something else, so knowing the dog lives isn’t really a spoiler.) The movie runs well north of two hours but feels tight. Triet has the gift of making even seemingly non-essential scenes or shots feel they’re there for a good reason, even if only as part of the fabric of the story. Like any good family drama, and any good legal thriller, the plot keeps popping off revelations that put a spin on everything we’ve seen.

Sandra Hüller is having quite a season, Oscar-nominated for her work here and also starring in another multiple nominee, The Zone of Interest. Here she walks a thin line between helping us believe in Sandra and keeping it ambiguous whether we should believe her. I never doubted why Sandra may have done anything she did; what I still don’t quite know is whether she did anything, and the movie is no help. A verdict is reached, but the movie doesn’t necessarily agree — or disagree — with it and isn’t interested in selling it to us, either. Hüller is backed up in every corner by compelling co-stars, including Samuel Theis, who makes his only real scene count and resonate with fear and rage. I’m not sure, though, if Anatomy of a Fall is for the kind of moviegoer who needs a clearcut ending where nothing is left for the imagination to dwell on. It’s definitely more for the dwellers, the art-house fans who like their movies to talk to them plain, adult to adult. 

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