Karlovy Vary continues to present the highlights of this year’s cinematography. The less watched festival prize, the Palme d’Or in Cannes, France, the month before last, was won by a woman only for the third time. In Anatomy of a Fall, director Justine Trietová thoughtfully combines family and court drama. It shows that when a French film talks a lot about literature, it is far from snobbish boredom.
Writer Sandra sits with a glass of wine, listening to a student who has come to her remote chalet in the French Alps for an interview, but she clearly can’t concentrate. Although he is enjoying the presence of the young woman, the booming music is coming from above and is getting so intense that it is necessary to interrupt the call.
It’s just a harbinger of things to come. Sandra’s husband Samuel, a lover of loud music, is soon lying in the snow in front of the house in a pool of blood.
The very first scenes of Anatomy of a Fall reveal the director’s feeling for building tension and gradually dispensing information. We see a boy playing with a dog and running around with it, while two women are talking in the room. We hear the music, but we don’t know who is making it. And we probably won’t even notice that a teenage boy named Daniel is blind. It is only when he finds his father lying with his head broken that it becomes apparent that he perceives the situation with all other senses than sight.
The suggestive introduction opens the door to questions about whether Samuel’s fall was suicide, an accident, or someone helped him. Because if everything happened with someone else’s complicity, there aren’t many suspects other than wife Sandra. Especially when the various minor disagreements the couple has been going through start to surface.
The great German actress Sandra Hüller, best known so far for her role as the uptight daughter in the comedy drama Toni Erdmann, plays the protagonist as an impenetrable being. She could easily be a murderer. But at the same time, there is no monster.
Pictured from Anatomy of a Fall is Sandra Hüller. | Photo: Les Films de Pierre
The clue is simply not forthcoming in this film, as the entire middle section in the courtroom, where direct evidence is lacking, will show. And so assumptions, a recording of an argument from the day before death and also literature come to the rescue.
Both Samuel and Sandra were writers. Unlike her husband, who was going through a creative crisis, Sandra is still creating. The pieces of the puzzle slowly brought into the courtroom by the witnesses, the defense and the prosecution not only shed new light on the question of what and how happened, but simultaneously paint a complicated family portrait in which variables such as the son’s accident, jealousy and artistic frustration figure in.
At the same time, the tension and emotions are increasing, strengthened, for example, by the fact that the accused German, Sandra, switches from French to English in the later stages of the make-up, in order to better portray her feelings and the complex circumstances of her relationship with her husband, who liked to listen to music loudly and often. Among other things, he also recorded a large number of things that happened in the family – at first with the knowledge of the surroundings, later not. It was probably part of trying to overcome a creative block.
The director and screenwriter Justine Trietová leaves the door open to different interpretations here, as in all the details. At one point, the motifs of the books of both writers are drawn into the game. Again, it is not just a question of whether and how fiction can be used in court as a valid argument and indirect evidence. Also hidden in the background is a consideration of the power and perception of literature in society.
Furthermore, the author examines between the lines how the family and partner coexistence of two writers is affected by the fact that one is successful, the other in a creative crisis. When one accuses the other of stealing an idea in the heat of an argument, is it just a momentary affectation, or is an old wound that has never been properly worked on really opened up?
Sandra actually developed one of Samuel’s unrealized ideas into a successful book – albeit with his approval, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t feast on it. There are a number of similar hints in the film, and the director always views them in such a way that they can be key information, but also one of the trifles, banalities or quibbles that are numerous in every relationship.
Finally, Daniel, who has been sidelined until now, takes center stage. It is the testimony of the blind boy that could be the key.
The film Anatomy of a Fall will be released in Czech cinemas by the distribution company Aerofilms. | Video: The Playlist
The anatomy of the fall does end with a court verdict. But satisfaction does not come from it, because we are not moving in the territory of a detective story, the key is not the resolution of the case, but the ethical drama in the background, which dominates roughly the last quarter of the film.
When the truth cannot be found, a decision must be made. But whatever it is, there will always remain in the background the pain of the fact that things could be completely different.
Justine Triet has made a universal drama that may not be the event of the season, but the head of the Cannes jury, the thoughtful Swedish director Ruben Östlund, made no mistake in awarding the Palme d’Or to this cleverly constructed picture. He knows how to unsettle until the last second.
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“It was always very pleasant to work with the movie stars who came to Karlovy Vary,” said interpreter Helena Koutná in the Spotlight program. | Video: Jakub Zuzánek