Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Trieu is released. Review

Justine Trieu’s film Anatomy of a Fall, having won at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, received a symbolic certificate of quality. I’m convinced that it’s not fake. Andrey Plakhov.

A family lives in an Alpine chalet, buried in snow in winter: eleven-year-old Daniel and his parents. Both mother and father are engaged in literary work. Sandra Woiter is a successful writer; her husband Samuel has yet to establish himself in this profession. He is French, she is German: not quite ordinary, but not so unique for today’s Europe, an international cell of society where English is the common language. Daniel became visually impaired after an accident long ago. Returning from a walk with his guide dog, he discovers in front of the entrance the body of his dead father with a hematoma on his head – either he fell out, or was thrown out, or was thrown out of the attic.

A long investigation begins, followed by a trial in which Sandra becomes the main suspect (and target of the press, greedy for sensation). The viewer gets the opportunity to plunge headlong into the jungle of the French judicial system, to get to know its exemplary and its absurd sides. Interviews with witnesses, investigative experiments, versions of medical experts, analysis of the trajectory of the fall of the body and three drops of blood. Titanic battles between a misogynistic prosecutor and a lawyer who sympathizes with Sandra. And even reading to the jury fragments of the heroine’s novels, written in auto-fiction format: they, too, may contain the key to the truth. The truth itself turns before the audience, first one side, then another, but never appears in its full form and volume. In it we feel an insurmountable gap between image and sound, visibility and meaning, reality and its interpretation. As the process progresses, incriminating audiotapes emerge (Trieu immediately turns them into video recordings), and with them – unsightly details of the characters’ family life – betrayals, quarrels, even assault. They in some ways refute, in some ways they confirm Tolstoy’s idea about the similarity of happy families and that each unhappy family experiences everything “in its own way.”

Courtroom drama has a rich history as a film genre; one of its textbook samples is called “Anatomy of a Murder”, filmed by the American Otto Preminger. There is also a French classic – “The Truth” by Henri-Georges Clouzot, where the accused also turns out to be a woman, the heroine of Brigitte Bardot. These films, along with Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, are most often remembered in connection with Anatomy of a Fall. There are some similarities – sometimes in the dramatic structure, sometimes in the criticism of misogyny, but there are many more features that make Trieu’s picture interesting “in its own way.”

In fact, this is not a festival film – unlike most of its competitors in the Cannes competition. But “Anatomy of a Fall” deservedly won. She has energy and confidence, especially needed in times of confusion and vacillation. Nobody expected these scarce qualities from Trieu, a director of professional films that fit into the feminist agenda, but are not at all outstanding. As it turned out, they were run-ups, rehearsals – both “In Bed with Victoria” and “Temptation”. A woman writer on the thin line between life and literature, equally thin gender barriers, and even a dog playing a significant role in the plot – all these components were already present in Trieu’s artistic field, but for the first time they came together into a complete puzzle.

It has several key clutches. First: the conflicting husband and wife are both writers, and this explains a lot. I recently visited an exhibition of photographs of Alice Spring, the wife of Helmut Newton: he was a German Jew, she was an Australian, and this is a rare case of fruitful family creative dialogue. As a rule, charismatic poets, artists, etc. sooner or later run away: let’s remember, for example, Akhmadulina and Yevtushenko or Tikhonov and Mordyukova. It’s hard to judge the level of talent between Sandra and Samuel from the film; most likely, she is a skilled fiction writer, nothing more; he never left the stage of searching for his individuality. But rivalry and creative jealousy undoubtedly poisoned their relationship with slow poison. She fed the family, but according to the rules of the new ethics, he was left to farm and raise his son. In addition, she borrowed the idea of ​​his cherished novel, quickly developed and implemented it: another injection to her husband’s creative vanity.

The second important motive is the multilingualism of the film and its heroine. Finding herself a defendant in a trial in France, she is forced to testify in French, which she knows far from perfectly and in difficult cases she switches to English. Sandra is played by the best German actress today, Sandra Hüller: she is a true master of both filigree psychological drawing and virtuoso linguistic play. She is superbly assisted by the actress’s border collie Messi: Snoop, played by him, was rightly awarded the canine Palme d’Or, traditionally awarded in Cannes.

But perhaps the biggest revelation of this film is a very young Milo Machado Graner as Daniel. This amazing boy lives in a blind spot, but is all the more sensitive to the tactile and sound landscape. He conducts his own investigation into the family tragedy and draws his own conclusions from it; some of the adults, of course, are trying to help him, but the child’s, as well as the dog’s, intuition is superior. And if Daniel takes his mother’s side, it is not because he is one hundred percent sure of her innocence (perhaps he is even sure of the opposite). But because he understands: the human fall, literally and figuratively, has a trajectory too complex for any court to accurately calculate and evaluate. And fallen loved ones need mercy and compassion.