
I wonder what he did in provoking someone into
doing this to him? Was it the way he was dressed,
maybe? Or maybe he'd been drinking?
Anatomie d’une chute
dir: Justine Triet
2023
Anatomy of a Fall is an odd film if what you think you’re getting is a crime / legal drama, which would be a reasonable assumption based on how it’s presented. And it won a bunch of awards, so you’d also think, since it’s a French film, that it must be all classy and shit.
But for a French film, there’s a surprising amount of dialogue in English. And the lead character is German. No one else speaks German, so she has to speak French, begrudgingly, and English when she can get away with it.
Which is, like, all of the time. I don’t pretend to know much about the French, but I do know two things: they laugh when non-French people try to speak French, and they pretend not to know English when people try to jabber at them without resorting to French.
And yet everyone seems cool with it, even her eleven year old son Daniel, who speaks no English whatsoever.
Strange vibes. But that’s not what the film is about. It’s on the surface about what happened to cause her husband Samuel to fall out of a window to his death.
On a deeper level maybe it’s about whether, if she did do it, was it an understandable thing to do? If not justifiable?
We spend a lot of time in a French court room, so the profound differences between their model and the ones we have in Britain or Australia are on display. As in another recentish film I watched mostly set in a French courtroom, being Saint Omer, the differences between the adversarial system we have in Australian courts and the inquisitorial system they have in France couldn’t be more stark.
To put it more simply, they say some crazy shit in court which wouldn’t fly in this hemisphere, let me tell you.
They still have a presumption of innocence for an accused, but it doesn’t really sound like it. In practice, in the inquisitorial courtroom, all these judges are basically yelling at the defendant, and the prosecutor yells most of all.
And she, Sandra, is there, singing for her dinner and for her life.
I don’t buy that it’s really a legal drama. It’s really about the process of the trial revealing all these details about Sandra and Samuel’s lives together: all their ambitions, jealousies, disappointments and frustrations. They’re not revealed in a way that explain motives or justifications for this or that; it’s more to get us, those of us of a certain age, those of us who have been with partners for long enough that they, too, could imagine being frustrated enough to want to push us out of windows, because everything up to but not including the potential murder is completely understandable.
It portrays a long term relationship as having a mosaic-like quality. Individual tiles or sections might reflect a certain narrative, a certain argument, but they’re only part of the whole, and don’t mean much or illuminate much out of context. The prosecutor tries to tease out details from their lives that surely point to Sandra wanting to, or at least very much being capable of murder, but Sandra’s recourse is to shine a different light on the same details to create a different picture – one in which her husband’s frustrations and disappointments, guilt and pride turned inward and resulted in thoughts of self-harm.
And in a turn up for the books, many of the prosecutors sexist and chauvinistic assertions during the trial barely get contested, and tend to work on the grounds of “well, if you were capable of sleeping with other women, you’re definitely capable of murder” or “since you’re a no talent hack and had to plagiarise your husband’s novel in order to be successful, you definitely maybe sorta murdered him?”
I haven’t even referred to that terrible piece of music yet: you will come to hate it too, as much as Sandra probably did.
Just for some crucial context: at the very start of the film Sandra is being interviewed by a student (Camille Rutherford), but an unseen Samuel deeply resents the interviewer’s presence. He starts playing, on a loop, an instrumental cover of a 50 Cent song call P.I.M.P. It’s all kettle drums and synths, and it’s by the Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band.
The volume is turned up to a deafening level, and it’s playing on a loop, meaning the interview must end, and by the end of this two and a half hour film, you too will hate the song so much that you might just murder someone to get away from it.
The couple’s son Daniel (most excellent Milo Machado-Graner) goes for a walk with his seeing-eye dog, being visually impaired, and is the one who finds the father’s body on the ground.
The fucking song is still playing. The son is distraught, understandably, and is an unreliable witness to his own father’s demise. He couldn’t have seen anything that would either confirm what happened with his father, or exonerate his mother, but he has clearly been traumatised from years of listening to his stupid writer parents fight and argue.
Writers, eh? They’re the absolute worst. No good comes from massive, fragile egos rubbing up against each other demanding to be heard.
Right from the start when the questions begin, Sandra is calm, confident, but brittle. She has explanations for all the questions and angles, but they’re delivered with a level of ambiguity. A person can be telling the truth about something even when there’s a bunch of lies thrown in for good measure, and the reverse can be true as well: telling a massive whopper requires a structure of truths beneath it in order to maintain some plausibility.
I always found her entirely believable at all times, especially when I thought she might be lying.
The prosecution’s big swing is the playing of a recording that was made the day before Samuel’s date with gravity, which was made without Sandra’s knowledge or consent, and it’s meant to show how volatile Sandra is, and how angry she is with her husband.
In any other film the contrast would itself be indicative of the accused being completely different from how they have portrayed themselves in the courtroom, and thus guilty beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise.
But I think the playing of it backfires spectacularly: We get to watch Sandra and Samuel interacting in a flashback, the only time we actually see Samuel, but we know, since he’s recording their spat for material for a book he wants to write (he always wants to write, but doesn’t actually get to write, which is the worst kind of writer), and is goading her into a frenzy, and she’s just keeping it real. In the section of the flick that went viral, at least for a while on the TikToks and the Insta reels, she’s lambasting him for blaming her for his own failings as a man, as a dad, but especially as a writer. She sees his own pride as his biggest obstacle, using it as he does to justify not trying.
The thing is, were he not dead (now), he would have been slaughtered from having that played aloud in public. Words can kill too, you know.
I found this fascinating to watch. It’s maybe a bit long. Two and a half hours is maybe a bit long, but I enjoyed it immensely. Sandra Hüller is a force of nature and I’d watch her reading either an English, French or German phonebook, because I’m sure she’d bring the same fierce strength, ambivalence and emotional fragility to the task that she does here. She should be in all the things and all the roles, and if only Emma Stone wasn’t having a banner year getting all the awards for having starred in Poor Things, I would say Sandra would have been guaranteed to win the Oscar with no doubts. But you don’t get to choose what other films come out in a given year, you just do your best and wait for all the awards to come your way, eventually.
8 times we need to create space for justifiable homicides as well out of 10
--
“I don’t give a fuck about what is reality, okay?” - Anatomy of a Fall
- 425 reads