To quote a Ginuwine song title, the world is so cold in Anatomy of a Fall, the Palme d’Or-winning drama from French filmmaker Justine Triet. Set mostly on the snowy mountains of France’s Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes,the story is just as bleak and chilly as the movie’s surroundings.
This is technically a courtroom thriller, as the bulk of the film sees a character on trial for the murder of her significant other. The woman is Sandra (Sandra Hüller, aka the long-suffering daughter from 2016’s Toni Erdmann), a German writer who’s been accused of offing her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis). Although her husband’s death seems like a suicide — he’s found outside their home by their son (Milo Machado-Graner) after plunging from an attic window — an investigation suggests there might have been foul play.
Triet doesn’t appear to be interested in crafting a suspenseful mystery that gives you a revealing resolution. Fall is really about the disintegration of a marriage. Once Sandra is on trial, consistently being coached by her lawyer friend (Swann Arlaud) on how not to appear guilty, she’s forced to answer questions about her and her hubby’s not-so-solid union. We enter the movie fully aware that things are tense between the two: The opening scene features Sandra being interviewed at her home by a woman. It’s a breezy convo that’s cut short by her husband blasting an instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” — yep, you heard me — upstairs.
With a script co-written with her husband, fellow filmmaker Arthur Harari, Triet presents a marriage story in which both sides have legitimate reasons for thinking the other is not carrying their end of the load. The movie’s intense centerpiece is a lengthy argument between Sandra and Samuel, which Samuel recorded and is later played in the courtroom. Triet flashes back to that heated exchange in their kitchen, with Samuel accusing Sandra of everything from infidelity to plagiarism and Sandra refusing to play the bad guy in Samuel’s self-victimizing narrative.
While she’s known for dramedies like Age of Panic, In Bed With Victoria and Sibyl (the last of which co-starred Hüller), Triet goes all-in on the riveting seriousness that makes up Fall. Inspired in part by the Amanda Knox case, Triet creates her own scandalous, sensational trial wherein the prosecution (played prickly by a bald-headed Antoine Reinartz) seems hellbent on painting the accused as a cold, heartless killer. (Between this and the equally harrowing Saint Omer, U.S. distributor Neon is beginning to become the stateside home for French legal dramas about women on trial for killing a loved one.) Triet occasionally makes awkward moves with the camera, creating zooms and pans that seem more like accidents that were left in. It’s like she’s making sure the audience is unsure about who or what to focus their attention on.
As a woman who tries to remain logical and pragmatic even when things become increasingly dire, Hüller maintains a sympathetic levelheadedness even in moments when it seems like her world is completely unraveling. Machado-Graner gives the film’s best performance as Sandra’s visually impaired son. He gives off wise-beyond-his-years energy as an 11-year-old piano prodigy who’s painfully aware of the gravity of the situation.
You’ve gotta give props to Triet for wondering what would happen if you melded Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage with the documentary miniseries The Staircase (two productions that were both remade by HBO, by the way). You basically get a mystery where figuring out who did it is not important. What is important — as Anatomy of a Fall expertly, exquisitely lays out — is how it got to that point in the first place.
