Anatomy of a Fall (Preview)
Reviewed by Robert Koehler

Produced by Marie-Ange Luciani and David Thion; directed by Justine Triet; screenplay by Justine Triet and Arthur Harari; cinematography by Simon Beaufils; edited by Laurent Sénéchal; production design by Emmanuelle Duplay; costume design by Isabelle Pannetier; sound by Julien Sicart, Fanny Martin, Jeanne Delplancq, and Olivier Goinard; starring Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner, Antoine Reinartz, Samuel Theis, Jehnny Beth, and Camille Rutherford. Color, 150 min., English dialogue and French and German dialogue with English subtitles. A NEON release.

“A couple,” the character Sandra Voyter testifies in her own defense during her trial for allegedly murdering her husband, “is a kind of chaos.” The trial, the extraordinary centerpiece of Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet and co-written with her husband and frequent actor-writer collaborator Arthur Harari, becomes an arena in which values are debated and truth is uncovered (at least, ideally), and perceptions are tested. Triet’s movie is built on the central concept of what we interpret from what we see and hear—the cinema’s essential elements—establishing the foundation of what we then perceive as “the truth.” The epistemological uncertainty that challenges both the investigation and trial is the fuel of Triet and Harrari’s narrative, which makes the crucial dramatic choice to depict Voyter (played in a complex, sometimes Sphinx-like manner by the subtle, multidimensional German actor Sandra Hüller) as ambiguously sympathetic.

Triet has commented that she was spurred to make Anatomy of a Fall by her interests in the Amanda Knox case, in which Knox went on trial in Italy in 2007 for the murder of her roommate (a true crime case of epistemological uncertainty if there ever were one). She also wished to stage a more involved depiction of a French court trial than she first did in her second film, Victoria (2016), unfortunately and needlessly retitled for the American market as In Bed with Victoria. The movie’s influences extend much further, starting with the title, a clear nod to Anatomy of a Murder (1959), promising and delivering a detailed examination of a case from forensics to jurisprudence. Furthermore, Triet and Harari structure their drama as a playful variation on a Law and Order episode, split between a police investigation and a courtroom setting of sparring attorneys and witnesses. The most important element informing the movie’s aesthetics and philosophy, however, is the European auto-fiction movement, which has held sway in recent years with the Nobel Prize-winning novels of Annie Ernaux, Mircea Cărtărescu’s oneiric, surrealist literature, Karl Ove Knaussgård’s My Struggle opus, and others.

In the film, Voyter is an acclaimed German-born novelist known for her autofiction narratives incorporating elements of her actual life with those she invents, a strategy placing her in the vanguard of contemporary European literature. Anatomy of a Fall is a work involving a series of interrogations, conversations, and dialogues (Socratic and otherwise), starting with an interview Voyter conducts at her French Alps home with a student (Camille Rutherford) doing her thesis, and intrigued about what is actual and made up in the novels. Voyter immediately reveals herself as cagey and possibly a control freak, directing the line of inquiry away from such potentially trite questions to her asking questions of the disarmed student, even as we begin to wonder whether or not Voyter may use this interview as future fictional material. Triet and Harari’s script for Sibyl (2020) also concerned a writer using actual subjects as her fictional subjects (in that case, a psychiatrist transposing a dramatic situation happening in her real life for her first novel); the difference now is that the novelist is a fully developed artist who has refined her mode of auto- fiction to a level transcending the type of moralistic inquiry done by those who myopically demand that fiction must be entirely fictitious.

Novelist and student are interrupted by the sound of a Calypso version of 50 Cent’s rap song, “P.I.M.P.”, blaring from upstairs. We learn later that this is being played by Voyter’s husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), a French-born teacher and frustrated novelist who feels oppressed by trying to work in Voyter’s shadow. To our ears, the act is rude, even violent, intended to stop the women from talking. This is the first of many examples in the movie of sound revealing states of mind, and of perceptions which may or may not be correct—such as a critical case later of the couple’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), insisting to police that he heard his parents talking calmly as he was leaving for a walk with beloved family dog Snoop (enacted by the extraordinary canine, Messi), when it later turns out that he was confused about where he was and what he heard. 

We’re already cognizant of this confusion before Daniel perceives it, since Triet’s precise montage has shown the actions of Voyter, the student interviewer, and Daniel leading up to the discovery of Samuel lying dead and blood-soaked in the snow outside their house. Triet begins and ends the first twelve minutes of playing time with Snoop, first looking off-screen at the interview scene, then following him through the death scene and the house during the police’s first interview with Voyter and ending with Snoop’s POV (!) of a mantle photograph of an unsmiling Samuel.

In this opening sequence, whose brilliance is only apparent in retrospect, Triet establishes all of the film’s central themes of perception and misperception, of the impact of power dynamics, of assumptions of guilt and innocence, of the interplay of Voyter’s complicated family, of how knowing one part of something never equates to knowledge of the whole, while also introducing the story’s key, hiding-in-plain-sight subjects—one who can’t see (Daniel) and one who can’t speak (Snoop)…

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Robert Koehler contributes writing and criticism for Cinema Scope, Variety, DGA Quarterly, and Sight and Sound.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 2