JUSTINE TRIET: ANATOMY OF A FALL/ANATOMIE D'UNE CHUTE (2023) - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL


SANDRA HÜLLER IN ANATOMY OF A FALL

A woman is tried on suspicion of her husband's murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the sole witness. (Cannes: Palme d'Or, 2023.)

You will see no more warmly engaging and beautifully well made new film this year than Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall. Nothing radically new here. In fact Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave from last year starts with the same ingredients: a man falls to his death in the mountains and his wife is suspected of pushing him. Only there the point was the police detective falls in love with the woman suspect. Here, the focus is on the woman, notably played by the great Sandra Hüller, who's also featured in another of the year's best films, the German-language The Zone of Influence. And it's a courtroom drama in which the couple's young vision-impaired son Daniel (the stunningly good Milo Machado Graner) winds up playing a key role in the trial.

The cast also includes the under appreciated Swann Arlaud as Maître Vincent Renzi, the chief defense attorney for Sandra Voyter (Hüller), also a friend, and somethihg more.

"Something more" applies to this whole movie. Even the family dog, Snoop (Messi) - an engaging, funny name - a guide for the son, winds up playing a far greater role than you'd expect, though that role manages to feel perfectly natural. Nothing seems contrived here - not at the moment, anyway: courtroom dramas are inherently stylized films, because they are dramas. The thing is to play that drama well, and this Anatomy of a Fall achieves.

This latest accomplishment makes French director Justine Triet a major player. Her evolution over a decade has been remarkable. She showed ambition and prowess in her debut with The Age of Panic in 2013, which combined relationship drama with complex street action. Her hilarious 2016 comedy In Bed with Victoria was a triumph for her and for her stars Virginie Efira and Vincent Lacoste - though the anglophone critics didn't think so, and equally panned Triet's Sibyl , featuring Efira, on which I agreed. Anatomy of a Fall has even more intensity and complexity than these comedies and much more seriousness, without losing the earlier warmth and an undercurrent of humor that flavors the courtroom histrionics. This time while digging into the deepest emotional pain anyone can feel, the loss of a parent and a spouse, with a mother and her son's lives and futures uncertain, this winds up in a strange way being a kind of feel-good movie.

Literally "feel-good" because focused on the senses of seeing and hearing. One of the outstanding features seems to be the in-your-face intensity of its sound. The action begins at a mountain chalet in the French Alps, where Sandra, a successful writer, is having a jokey chat with a younger woman who's come to interview her. Music gets played so loud that after a struggle Sandra calls off the interview, even though they were enjoying a drink and having fun. It was more than an interview. That is why her musician husband, in his studio on the attic floor, has jealously turned up the volume.

We find out early that Daniel can't see. His optic nerve was damaged beyond repair in an accident with his father at age eight. This is true even though he runs around freely with Snoop as his guide on the snow-covered slopes and paths surrounding the chalet. Then he discovers his father's fallen, bloody body and cries for help.

But we learn more about this sequence later, of course, in the over-and-overing of events that follows when a death leads to an investigation and the trial of Sandra Voyter for the murder of her husband. It's suspected that she may have struck him and pushed him out the window.

Language plays a distinctive role here. Sandra is German; her husband was French. They spoke English, and Daniel learned both. Early on, as Sandra and Maître Vincent Renzi walk around the chalet and he questions her about events leading up to her husband's death, she says she has to speak English because her French isn't good enough to convey the complexity of what she's trying to say. In the courtroom the trial is conducted in French but testimony flips back and forth between French and English when Sandra speaks. This helps give us a sense of how unstable the situation is for her, not to mention for Daniel.

Speaking of sound, a major moment late in the trial is the playing of a recording the dead man made of a big fight between him and Sandra the day before his death. It's very loud, and played with the text of it shown on a screen above. Daniel, who had a habit of leaving when his parents argued, has heard none of it. It's disturbing, and he hears it all, because he has insisted on being present in the courtroom for it. It's as if we hear it with the hyper-sensitive auditory sense the boy's early blindness has developed in him. Retrospectively we hear that extra-loud music in the opening sequence that way too, causing us to feel the traumatic events sympathetically. Sympathy is part of Anatomy's sense of warmth. The film keeps us on our toes.

The essence of the courtroom of course is the theatricality of the proceedings, with a flamboyant, shaven-headed attorney for the prosecution in flowing red robes (Antoine Reinartz} who is a real piece of work, and brings in several experts to present information that is damning, at least when bolstered by their theories. We are discovering about the dead man, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), who turns out to be a work in progress, a musician who wants to write a novel but is blocked, and saddled with a restoration of the chalet he took on himself but can't complete. The boy is discovering things about his father he didn't know. Some of this may feel contrived, at least in retrospect, as if the screenplay is making up the dead man and the prosecution case as it goes along. But the spirit of discovery keeps the action alive and riveting from first to last.

This is where young, floppy-haired Daniel comes in to play a decisive role - aided by Snoop (though Snoop doesn't get to testify, not in person anyway). Daniel is, after all, the primary witness, his blindness only intensifying the sense we always have that everything is uncertain in any trial, particularly the most crucial and life-threatening ones. Daniel doesn't really khow what happened to his father, but he has to do some serious thinking about whether his mother could be guilty: this is why some viewers consider this very emotional film to be a think piece. But it's much more about feelings, words, and performances throughout.

This is a richly entertaining film. Like all courtroom dramas it's very like a sports movie. All events lead up to the big final "game," i.e., testimony - here, by Daniel - where the team wins or loses. But Triet and her cowriter and regular collaborator Arthur Harari burst the chains of this convention by carrying the action beyond the trial. The real finale comes when Sandra sees Daniel again back at home. The point wasn't after all winning or losing, but delving deep into these lives. What a nice contrast this is to the absorbing but frustrating recent French courtroom drama, Mati Diop's Saint Omer. Triet never forgets the audience's need to be entertained that Diop chooses to ignore.

Anatomy of a Fall is one of the year's best films, and Sandra Hüller likewise is guaranteed attention at awards time.

Anatomy of a Fall/Anatomie d'une chute, 150 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes, where it won the Palme d'Or and the Queer Palm, as well as the Dog Palm for Messi as Snoop. It has shown in many international festivals through the rest of 2023. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, where it shows Oct. 7. It will be released in the US by Neon Oct. 13. Metacritic rating: 86%. Released Aug. 23 in France, the film received an AlloCiné critics rating of 4.4 (88%).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.