Female Film Critics 24/375
Golden Globe-winner as Best Foreign Film, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall has a scandalous premise that should intrigue true-crime aficionados. The whodunit plot pivots around Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) a writer who dies suspiciously after falling from the upper floor of an Alpine chalet and is discovered sprawled in the snow amid a trail of blood from a deep cranial wound.
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The title Anatomy of a Fall, not to mention the striking US poster graphic of a prone body, brings to mind Otto Preminger’s 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder and Saul Bass’s iconic poster art. Although Anatomy of a Fall is just as riveting a courtroom drama, it’s an unconventional one. Director and co-writer Justine Triet keeps the viewer engaged but off-kilter and she adroitly layers surprises and ambiguity. That’s just right for a film about what’s heard but not seen; the fine line between reality and fiction; how memory might not be trusted; and how two people can recall the same events with shaded perceptions.
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Anatomy of a Fall is most fascinating in its representation of how women are demonized by succeeding, asking for what they want, and being uncompromising. Of the lead character, one of her defense lawyers says, “if she is guilty of anything, it’s of succeeding where her husband failed.” In Justine Triet’s fourth outing as director, she and co-screenwriter Arthur Harari create the character of Sandra as neither victim nor hero, but a woman full of faults and weaknesses, just like most people. It’s in the ways that she is perceived in court and by the public, however, that we see just how much her gender plays a factor.
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In a bit of casting kismet, two of the biggest films this year star the same actor: Sandra Huller. Huller was dubbed the “Queen of Cannes” last May after director Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest took both the runner-up Grand Prize of the Festival and the FIPRESCI honors. Huller, 45, stars in the courtroom thriller Anatomy of a Fall as a woman on trial for her husband’s murder. The film is a carefully structured moral conundrum about truth and perception, and all of it hinges on Huller’s performance . In The Zone of Interest, a Holocaust film unlike any other, she plays Hedwig Hoss, a homemaker enjoying the upward mobility that comes with being the wife of the Commandant of Auschwitz. What Huller does here is understated and difficult to describe, but the specificity in her work is such that you will swear you know what the character smells like.
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Writer/director Justine Triet’s intriguing Anatomy of a Fall demonstrates in complex, compelling ways the elusive, bewildering search for the truth behind a death. The multilayered intrigue kicks off early in the film as wife Sandra and Samuel’s vision-impaired, eleven-year-old son Daniel discovers Samuel lying bloody in the snow beneath their Grenoble chalet’s second-floor window.
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An ambiguous tension sings throughout this meticulous courtroom drama after an author finds herself accused of killing her husband. Sandra Hüller plays writer Sandra, with Samuel Theis as Samuel, who is found dead from a fall in the snow by his young, partially-sighted son, Daniel (a compelling, intense performance from Milo Machado Graner). Whether Samuel’s death was an accident, suicide or murder hangs over the rest of the film. As Sandra faces a court case, we see that her guilt or innocence is merely one facet of her problems.
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It is a daunting challenge to present a cinematic experience that does justice to the Holocaust without repeating previous worthy considerations of the unfathomable horrors. Stretching back to Alain Resnais’ 1956 Night and Fog, important fiction and nonfiction works have honored the victims’ memories amidst various dramatizations of Nazi inhumanity. Writer/director Jonathan Glazer has forged a new approach in The Zone of Interest, a narrative of overwhelming, astonishing restraint. Loosely based on Martin Amis’ 2014 novel, Glazer’s narrative enters the pantheon of unforgettable films on the Holocaust, adding another chapter to our understanding of the banality of evil.
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Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall is a riveting courtroom drama about guilt and innocence and what’s involved in trying to get at the truth. It’s a decidedly feminist film, and the beauty of its construction is an exquisite ambiguity that never falters. Triet said that viewers of the movie draw their own conclusion as to whether Huller’s character is guilty or innocent.
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To anyone who was paying even the most cursory attention to Justine Triet’s career – particularly her 2019 film Sibyl – that she was working her way towards winning the revered Palme d’Or at Cannes comes as absolutely no surprise. Only the third woman to win the award after Jane Campion and Julia Ducournau, with Anatomy of a Fall, Triet is revealed as a filmmaker going from strength to strength. While in many ways Sibyl exchanges its hot erotic core for something far more domestic and polite in Triet’s latest, both films at their heart focus on women trapped in challenging marriages with complicated relationships with their children, and both tell the stories of women caught in the flux of periods of enormous transition.
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The cultural fascination with Empress Elisabeth of Austria remains well over a century after her tragic death. A rebellious royal who was minimised by her husband, dissatisfied with restrictive court life, and the nexus of gossip and intense public scrutiny, Elisabeth, or Sisi, was the precursor for Diana, Princess of Wales. Frauke Finsterwalder attempts to bring Sisi to life through the eyes of her faithful companion, Countess Irma Sztáray who was with Sisi in the final four years of her life. Finsterwalder’s reimagining of Sisi and her court is bold and modern.
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