Anatomie d'une chute
***/****
starring Sandra Hüller, Samuel Theis, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner
written by Justine Triet & Arthur Harari
directed by Justine Triet
by Angelo Muredda The list of thematic provocations is long in Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet's twisty Palme d'Or winner–the kind of winding, enigmatic character study that people who miss reading literary fiction wistfully describe as "novelistic." Even before the credits sequence, a montage of old family photos and videos taken in better times, we've been introduced to any number of hooks that one could build a hot-button arthouse legal thriller around. From the dead husband found at the bottom of a chalet by, of course, his blind son and support dog–below the window from which he either fell or was pushed–to the mysterious upstairs presence of his aloof, probably bisexual wife, a foreigner who isn't fluent in the language of the court she's about to be tried in, Anatomy of a Fall plants itself in the land of ambiguity and intrigue. That's to say nothing of the icy, wordless air we feel pass between the strained partners in the opening moments, where the now deceased man was blasting a steel-drum cover of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." on repeat during his author wife's flirtatious interview with a female student, still more circumstantial evidence for us to file away for later. From the start, then, Triet commits to a tricky balancing act, pitching her work somewhere between a formalist drama concerned with observation and perspective, attuned to what we can or can't know of a person or a marriage from the outside, and a more prurient genre exercise about killer wives, cuckolded husbands, and unseeing witnesses.
For the most part, Triet pulls it off, largely thanks to her technical execution in the information-dense prologue, which expertly uses sound, establishing shots, and hard cuts to map out the space where Sandra (Sandra Hüller), Samuel (Samuel Theis), and their adolescent son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) are about to act out their fateful domestic drama, setting the stage for those elements' return in the form of transcripts and recreations in the trial to follow. Apart from this virtuosic opening, Triet's direction is mostly unobtrusive, staying out of the way of her actors and her screenplay (co-written, curiously enough, with her real-life partner Arthur Harari, as with her previous film, Sibyl), and notable primarily for its prowess in mixing media sources like video tapes and audio recordings as characters seek to get closer to the truth of an event by combing through aesthetic clues. The showstopper is Hüller, who is funny and characteristically blunt as her namesake Sandra, a successful German novelist transplanted by love to her beta husband's hometown in France only to be sidelined by her grief over the accidental injury that left Daniel blind and by Samuel's neuroticism about his career stagnation and then charged, against her protestations of innocence, with Samuel's murder.
Hüller's is a marvellous performance, equally inviting and brusque. It nearly makes up for the film's heavy-handed plotting in the last act, which hinges largely on the testimony of the least interesting stakeholder, Daniel. More metaphor than person for much of the runtime, Machado-Graner's ill-defined character struggles to shed his earlier status as a figurative device–both the blind witness and the tragically disabled child–as he takes on his new role of audience surrogate, hinted at by the earlier moments where he imagines, seemingly for our sake, the lawyer's alternate scenarios for what happened to his father. Apart from a disturbing detour into animal cruelty, Daniel's late-breaking detective work mainly underlines an earlier piece of advice he receives from a court aid: that to overcome a lack of knowledge, one must decide what is true–inventing one's own belief, if one must. That's good advice for Daniel as well as a helpful tip for the spectator, who is tasked with sifting through these ambiguous elements and coming to an informed conclusion–though one wonders if we couldn't have gotten there on our own. Programme: Special Presentations
