Lola On Film

It is through one of those quirks of circumstance that, due to the unavailability of Dolly Parton’s Jolene for the soundtrack of Justine Triet‘s engrossing Anatomy Of A Fall (2023), co-written by her partner Arthur Harari, the German funk group Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band’s instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. is now living rent-free in my head. An ear-worm for those mundane moments of possible high-drama, and a reminder of the Rashomon effect of a well-told story, still not resolved in my mind.

This Palme d’Or-winning subversive psychological courtroom thriller is a proper postmodern 21st century mystery, ambivalent to its very core, leaving ample space for lingering suspicions and complex afterthoughts. It is also an all-around accomplished cinema, that, without too much fanfare, draws us into its narrative space, effortlessly.

We dive straight into the picturesque atmosphere of a mountain house in the Alps, near Grenoble, France, a charming chalet still under construction — as stark metaphor for a marriage we immediately witness in crisis. There is a bouncing ball on the wooden steps leading to the attic, and the looping beats of the aforementioned P.I.M.P blasting from above. Samuel (Samuel Theis), the frustrated househusband of a novelist wife Sandra (a majestically precisional Sandra Hüller) is decorating their attic space for the purposes of tourism, as the family has hit tough financial times. He is also clearly sabotaging an interview that his wife is having downstairs with a young graduate student called Zoé (Camille Rutherford), conducting research for her thesis on the writing process. Sandra is bisexual, we learn subsequently, which adds an extra layer of meaning to the music playing on repeat. Zoé leaves. Shortly after, tragedy ensues. Samuel falls through the attic roof window. As the autopsy results are inconclusive, this leaves doubt to whether he was pushed, slipped — or indeed has committed suicide. Sandra, the only one in the house when the fall occurred (other than Samuel), is brought in for questioning, and ends up as prime suspect, on trial for murder — her only hope of an acquittal her young son Daniel (a pitch-perfect Milo Machado-Graner). Daniel is visually impaired, and everything hangs on the veracity of his court testimony about the fatal day.

A quietly intelligent, observant boy, it was Daniel who found the body of his father in the snow, after walking in the woods with Snoop, his guide dog — a charming border collie, with piercing blue-eyes (named Messi in RL). The family pet somehow lingers at the heart of the tale, not unlikely the silent witness to the mechanics of the entire catastrophe. It was Snoop that was fetching that bouncing ball in the opening scenes. Triet being such a meticulous filmmaker, this audibly emphasised detail must hold some sort of narrative significance.

In the course of the trial we discover that Daniel lost his eyesight due to an accident which involved his late father. Samuel was supposed to pick the boy up from school, but chose to write instead, sending their nanny. Too late to stop Daniel from crossing the road alone. Their son’s condition, unsurprisingly, looms large over the emotional landscape of the family.

The breakdown of a marital relationship in which the wife is the breadwinner, creatively and professionally more successful than her husband, constitutes the backbone of the Anatomy of a Fall, and its delicate nervous system, becoming more pronounced as the story unfolds, dissecting all the elements of the seemingly accidental fatal fall. One of the spouses’ death cracking wide open the complicated power dynamics of the aggravated couple in a society that is still not quite ready for tables to be turned fully, without recoiling at the subversion.

A dutiful wife, despite her intellectual dominance, Sandra follows her husband to his location of choice, his home town, supports him in his artistic endeavours, endures his emotional crises, picks extra translation jobs as he chooses to leave his professorial post. Samuel is French, Sandra is German, we find out that they used to live in London, and that English was their middle ground, a way they communicated, without really learning each others native tongue. We also discover that Samuel believed Sandra’s attitude to be castrating, as all of their intimate psychological baggage and Daniel’s secretly taped marital fights spill out in the court proceedings. The state has, in turn, assigned to the trial a particularly vicious (and sexist) prosecutor, fiercely portrayed by Antoine Reinartz, who, in an almost theatrical fashion, deconstructs the literature written by Sandra as insidious real-life murderous confessions.

It seems that what is equally on trial is Sandra’s daring to be the successful creative in the relationship, as her artistic methods are further cruelly depicted as selfishness and even idea-theft.

Thankfully, Triet is not as banal a director as to rush towards a heavy-handed political message (guns blazing). She turns instead to a clear-eyed, forensic examination of Sandra, with the convenience of Hüller‘s ability to convey each nuance of her character’s possibly dark motivations, unpacking a mind of a woman overcome with an excess of responsibilities — bogged down in a relationship with a man she clearly has fallen out of love with, but whom she once obviously adored (as witnessed in the series of cleverly inserted old photographs of the couple while the opening credits roll).

Equally, through Machado-Graner’s delicate performance, his screen father receives some posthumous respect, as we sense that Samuel was also a dedicated parent, despite his egoism, deeply shaken by guilt and laden with depressive impulses.

Every single strand of violent undercurrents in the marriage are slowly disentangled, while the audience’s carefully constructed theories lose ground with each new twist. The format of a courtroom procedural becomes the perfect vehicle as overview to the simmering misogyny of various men in Samuel’s life standing witness to his wounded manhood, but also for deconstructing the depths of Sandra’s repressed resentment and rage, as well as her ample capabilities for manipulation — her storytelling panache, the roots of her autobiographical fiction, her undoubtable talent. The subtleties of her relationship with an old friend and now devoted attorney Vincent (an excellent, subdued Swann Arlaud), reveal Sandra as a most down-to-earth enchantress, at the same time natural and highly astute to human behaviour. Vincent is nevertheless desperate to see her freed, despite his continued ambivalence regarding her complete innocence.

Her son Daniel’s hesitation to ‘choose sides’ is also given careful consideration by Sandra, in ways that can be interpreted as both heartfelt and sincere, and possibly devious. It is the irreconcilable tension of his growing doubts on the death of his father, and the culpability of his mother, that finally triggers Daniel to free himself from his anguish, aided by the words of advice from his kindly state-appointed guardian, Marge (Jehnny Beth) — if you do not know what to believe, you must choose what the truth is for you.

Anatomy of a Fall is a triumph of understated filmmaking, with some of the best performances of the year. Very much a ‘show don’t tell’ type of affair, and an enduring enigma.

Not unlike human nature.

★★★★✩

Author: © Milana Vujkov