Fallout

‘Anatomy of a Fall’ breaks the recent pattern of Cannes Palme D’Or winners; ‘Triangle of Sadness,’ ‘Titane,’ and ‘Parasite’ were all formally innovative, deliberately transgressive, anti-establishment to the point of self-parody, and darkly comic at times. Justine Triet’s film, on the other hand, is a hyper-realistic French legal drama, as well as a deeply intimate discourse on the dissolution of a difficult marriage. It is gripping, beautifully-acted, a bit pretentious, and almost painfully naturalistic.

The ‘Fall’ of the title belongs to Samuel, a teacher and failed writer who has decamped to his somewhat decrepit boyhood chalet in the French Alps with the vague idea of renovating it to turn it into a B&B. The more we learn about him, the more we realize that was never going to happen. Also, he dies within the movie’s first 10 minutes. The French justice system has two options: declare his bloody fall a suicide, or charge his wife, Sandra, with murder. Eventually, it chooses the latter, and the final two-thirds of the movie involves a brutally emotional trial, and the fallout from the verdict.

ANATOMY OF A FALL  ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Justine Triet
Written by: Justine Triet, Arthur Harari
Starring: Sandra Hüller, Milo Mercado Granger, Swann Arlaud, Samuel Theis
Running time: 152 mins

The movie’s publicity website asks Did She Do It? And then the audience votes. Right now, the verdict is about 65 percent no, which tracks very well with Anatomy of a Fall’s many ambiguities.

Sandra is a successful writer, though “success”, as is often the case with writers, doesn’t bring her much money. The relationship, as we learn throughout the course of the trial, gradually devolved into a bitter rivalry, fraught with infidelity and emotional violence, after an accident involving their son Daniel, which left the kid partially blind.

So that’s the broad outline of Anatomy of a Fall, which could easily, given the lurid subject matter, be a cheap soap opera or a lurid melodrama. But it’s neither; it’s as realistic a portrait of a troubled dynamic and of artistic jealousy that we’ve seen on the screen for a long time. All the performances are excellent. The German actor Sandra Hüller, as Sandra (no relation), is a chilly, almost unlikable presence, slippery with the truth and somewhat unreliable. Swann Arlaud, as her lawyer, Vincent, also brings a quiet intensity, and an amazing head of hair, to his scenes.

But the film really hinges on an extraordinary performance by the child actor Milo Mercado Granger, as Daniel, who not only discovers his father’s dead body, but then must sit in a courtroom and listen to a detailed description of his parents’ troubled marriage. He carries an almost unbearable burden of trauma with the depth, dignity, and intelligence of someone four times his age. As he says over and over again, he just wants to see the truth, difficult enough as he’s nearly blind. His scenes are heartbreaking and hopeful and elevate this material far above the Lifetime movie genre that it often resembles.

Anatomy of a Fall is also, to American eyes, an interesting look at the French justice system. The lawyers and judges wear silly costumes. The jury sits on the dais with the judge. And they don’t allow cameras in the courtroom. Though the media plays a small part, and we see reporters outside the Grenoble courthouse and people debating Sandra’s novels on TV, the American version of this film would inevitably involve a media circus. Not one camera crew hovers outside Sandra’s chalet, which is hard to imagine from an American point of view.

If I have one criticism, and it’s a reasonably substantial one, it’s that the movie takes “writing” too seriously. Sandra writes novels. Samuel wants to write novels. There are lots of “I must write, I can’t write, why don’t you write” kinds of conversations. At times it feels a little bit like a Brooklyn cocktail party, and you just want to slap these people around. No one cares about your little writerly problems. Maybe that’s the point, but I’m not entirely sure Triet gets that, and because of it, the movie feels a little self-serious when it shouldn’t, like ‘Gone Girl’ for people who have subscribed to the New York Review of Books for 30 years and bring home food from the co-op in an NPR tote bag.

But then that kid Daniel comes back into the frame, and your heart breaks for him all over again. It takes a lot for a movie character to earn the audience’s full moral sympathy, but when it comes to Daniel, Triet’s camera does just that.