Anatomy of a Fall

Photo via IMDB

At first “Anatomy of a Fall” seems like a so-so title for an excellent movie, winner of the Palm d'Or at Cannes, now nominated for numerous Golden Globes including Best Drama.

Directed by Justine Triet who co-wrote the script with her partner Arthur Hurai, it's a murder mystery that evolves into compelling courtroom drama. But what it's really about is stories – the ones we tell each other, the ones we tell in public and the ones we tell ourselves. 

Stories, like the verdict in a trial, can never be more than approximations of the truth. If there even were such a thing as the truth.

The script follows what happens after 11-year-old Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) returns from a winter walk with his border collie Snoop, to find the body of his father Samuel (Samuel Theis) lying dead in the snow. Samuel would seem to have fallen from the third-floor balcony of their French chalet, but after the police arrive, they suspect his wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller), who was in the house at the time, may have been involved. 

Complicating things, Daniel has been almost blind ever since an accident damaged his optic nerve a few years earlier. He's not an ideal witness.

The film's original title “Anatomie d'une chute” has a more poetic ring. In subtitled French the movie is up for a foreign-language Golden Globe, even though much of the dialogue is spoken in English. 

“Blind Justice” might be a better title. Rather than a whodunnit, the murder mystery is whether it was a murder at all. And was the “Fall” an accident or a metaphor?

When the case goes to court, details of the couple's marriage start emerging, each more uncomfortable than the last. Wife and husband were both writers; she was the more successful of the two. Competitiveness and jealousy added to the insecurities, blame, shame and other resentments just under the surface of their marriage, which had been under additional financial pressures since their son's accident. 

Such raw, intimate candor looking at marital stress marks this as a foreign film, where the concept of Mature Audiences doesn't have anything to do with whether anyone takes their clothes off. (American audiences prefer the simpler emotions of the Marvel Universe.) But the terrain will be instantly recognizable, if painful,to anyone who's ever been in a serious relationship.

Is their crumbling marriage the “Fall” in the title? The fact that wife and husband were both writers, turning their lives into storyboards, creating fictions to live in, adds another level to the question of what really happened. How much their creative tensions and rivalry reflect those of the couple who wrote the film's script is anyone's guess.

Maintaining her innocence despite viewers' growing doubts, Sandra is a stoic figure in the courtroom, guided by her attorney (Swann Arlaud) playing defense against brilliant interrogation by the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz).

All the humiliation Sandra is experiencing so publicly, is made worse by the pain the revelations are causing her son, who insists on attending the trial each day.

Hüller's performance is wondrous, spanning the spectrum from vulnerability to courage.

For all the raw nerves it exposes, “Anatomy of a Fall” is visually beautiful, richly cinematic from its sweeping mountain panoramas to telling details in closeups of its cast of characters, whom we come to care deeply about as the story goes on.

While movies set in courtrooms are usually white-knuckle rides to reach a verdict, writer-director Triet has more than that on her mind. The law, it turns out, can be a pretty arbitrary realm. It's an arena of competing subjectivities – whoever comes up with the most convincing story wins.

Not a very reassuring concept as it resonates in courtrooms thousands of miles from the one in the movie.

The story does reach a final verdict, but leaves the distinction between guilt and innocence purposely blurry. In the face of such uncertainty, personal morality is all we've got to reach the right conclusion.

“Anatomy of a Fall” reaches the right conclusion.

And the title turns out to have been perfect all along.

Bravo!