Following on from the brilliant Sybil, Justine Triet double-taps it with Anatomy of a Fall, another rangy drama with rare psychological depth.
Written expressly for Sandra Hüller by Triet and her partner Arthur Harari – and you only hope that it doesn’t reflect their own relationship – it’s the old “did he fall or was he pushed story” spun out at tantalising length.
Did Sandra (Hüller’s character’s name too) push her husband to his death off the balcony of their swish chalet in the French Alps or was she asleep at the time, oblivious to everything with ear plugs in, as she claims? We follow Sandra from the film’s opening moments to the aftermath of the court case held to apportion guilt. Triet and Harari never tell us whether Sandra did it or not.
Hüller did not know either, apparently, and Triet would not tell her on set. Would it have affected Hüller’s performance if she had? Who knows? Either way it’s a great one, majestic in its moments of grand fury when, in flashback, Sandra and husband (Samuel Theis) have the row that the film is, in essence, all about – her success and his lack of it.
Did he commit suicide because he couldn’t measure up to the achievements of his successful-novelist wife? Did she murder him because she felt entitled to do so? Did she emasculate him? Maybe he emasculated himself? Were wider social attitudes to male and female roles in some way responsible? Is Sandra on trial because she’s a successful woman?
They all boil away below the surface, while blood-spatter analysts and psychiatrists deliver cool expert testimony at the trial that makes up the bulk of the movie’s running time. Add in a handsome lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), who may be representing Sandra for all the wrong reasons, and her blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), whose position on his mother’s guilt/innocence is also far from clear, and add roiling to the boiling.
There is a novelistic reach to Anatomy of a Fall. And a biblical fascination with hubris, which might explain Sandra’s “fall” as well as her husband’s. The hubris and personal motivations of supposedly objective “experts” is on trial too. The more we see of these people the less we know about what actually happened.
There’s a dark 1940s psychology at work here, as if Triet and Harari had sat down and watched a string of Bette Davis movies, or The Letter at least (naughty woman kills lover and tries to get away with it), Davis’s character imperious and standing on her dignity, as Sandra tries to do. It’s a dark, twisted, ugly and fascinating film, and so is this.
There are a couple of plot turns that are 1940s Hollywood too, including one development that surely cannot be part of courtroom procedure but which folds son Daniel (the increasingly impressive Milo Machado Graner) into the meat of the movie. The fact that Daniel, an eye witness, is blind also being pure 1940s Hollywood.
Add this to a long list of remarkable performances by Hüller, who usually jobs aways in supporting roles. In Triet’s Sybil, wrenching the spotlight momentarily away from the mesmerising Virginie Efira. In the strange and glorious Toni Erdmann, especially the astonishing last chunk of it. And in 2006’s harrowing Requiem, the film that put her on the map, where she played a young woman who might or might not be possessed.
By the end of Sibyl, Triet had peeled back layers of its key character to reveal a much more complex person beneath. By the end of Anatomy of a Fall she’s peeled back layer after layer of Sandra to reveal more than we knew at the outset but nothing at all about the one thing that would explain all the rest of her. The mystery endures. It’s riveting.
Anatomy of a Fall – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
