What follows in the courtroom is more than the material facts of the case, such as they are. Forensics don’t rule anything out; the trauma on Samuel’s head might have come from a blow from Sandra or by crashing into a shed on his way out the window. Maybe he jumped in a pique of despair from his failed writing career, failing marriage, and the guilt he carries over his son’s disability. Maybe the lacerating verbal fight that he and Sandra had the previous day, secretly recorded by Samuel, continued when Daniel left the house and escalated into the physical. Both are credible, but there’s no way to prove it. In an American criminal trial, there’s a sense that the trial would be over once it’s clear that there’s plenty of reasonable doubt. Here, the trial continues as an exhuming of Sandra and Samuel’s marriage, with the intent to prove motive and perhaps get a flustered Sandra to say something incriminating. Again, the rules of the court bear little resemblance to what’s been drilled into the average American viewer, as Sandra takes an active role in the trial far beyond that of a typical defendant. The combination of the novelty, the actors, and Triet’s dialogue make the film’s lengthy runtime fly by, buttressed not by cheap trial tropes like surprise witnesses but by new approaches from the prosecution or defense. Each opens up a fascinating new thread in that particular French way.
Like fellow 2023 release May December, Anatomy of a Fall puts its thumb in the eye of true crime. The media aspect of Anatomy of a Fall isn’t as sharp as Todd Haynes’ melodrama, but it’s in the background how ravenous the public is for a good story, and for a novelist who wrote a story about a wife murdering her husband, murdering her husband in real life is a pretty good story. That literary angle, where the scene is inseparable from the total work and vice versa, is where Anatomy of a Fall keeps ascending and becomes a meta work. Triet chose to place as brutal a marriage argument as has ever been depicted within the film that is about Samuel’s death, but is also about the death of the marriage. Why did she go with that one instead of a scene from a more content time, which the viewer only knows exist because Sandra insists that they do? The impossibility of defining a life or a life shared with others through one small window, or how slanted the telling of a true story can be without context muddles the question of guilt or innocence, especially when the state of Sandra’s marriage is subjected to the blunt instrument of a court proceeding. If the legal system can’t dissect it, what chance does a seedy, grasping media have?
Huller dominates the film, and her domination is made all the more impressive by the quality of the actors she shares the screen with. Dueling lawyers, with Swann Arlaud’s Vincent on Sandra’s side and Antoine Renartz for the state, are joys to watch in the courtroom, by turns incredulous and imperious with their questions and rebuttals. Vincent has a history with Sandra, and it gives them a relaxed chemistry and yet another facet to an already complex film. Machado-Graner is preternaturally composed when he gets his turn in the courtroom, and effectively agonized at home over what’s going to happen to him if the worst is true. His companion, the impassive Snoop, has the kind of dog face that implies something deeper, but he’s only witnessing without taking anything in. Theis, as Samuel, embodies a particular kind of middle-aged man, and though we only see him in this reduced state, it’s so lived-in in his few scenes that imagining something better becomes impossible.
As great as the supporting cast is, the film belongs to Huller and Triet. Anatomy of a Fall is the welcome return of a major force, capable of boiling drama as she was farce in Toni Erdmann, and the emergence of a brilliant new voice whose three earlier films now become must-watches. This is intelligent, adult filmmaking, stripped of cheap tricks and larded with the fascinating unknowability that is so much of human behavior. A