Evidence from married life – Weekend
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“Anatomy of a Fall” by the Frenchwoman Justine Trieu, which received the Cannes Palme d’Or this year, is being released. Two and a half hours of dissecting someone else’s life, disguised as a search for truth.
Snowy French Alps, a provincial hole, an old chalet in need of renovation. A student came to interview the famous German writer Sandra Woiter, who was a little tipsy, either flirting, or glad to take a break from her business. But suddenly, in the middle of the interview, deafening music starts playing on repeat from somewhere above. Sandra tries to pretend that everything is fine: her husband works in the attic, he likes loud music, sorry, let’s reschedule our conversation. But it’s clear that she’s annoyed. And the viewer, when the track plays for the third time, will be ready to kill this hard-working husband.
We will then hear the audio recording of this scene again – it will be played in the courtroom when the writer is charged with murder. After that interview, she, according to her, talked with her husband and went home. Their eleven-year-old son, Daniel, who is visually impaired, went for a walk with a guide dog, and when he returned, his father was dead, fell out of the window.
Did you fall out? Pushed out? Thrown out? Three versions, each with all the shades of hell for the wife and child.
A slow (sometimes delightfully slow) detective story with witness interviews and investigative experiments turns into a slow (sometimes unbearably slow) court drama, marriage story, scenes from married life. All quarrels, all misunderstandings, all mutual accusations of spouses will be dissected in court. The process of relationship breakdown, loss of interest, murder of desire – Sandra will be reminded of all her betrayals, her success as a writer, her lack of attention to her child. It feels like the whole world will defend her dead husband and the whole world will be against her. “They won’t look for the truth in court,” warns Sandra her lawyer, with whom she seems to have had something once, and maybe will. “You need to start looking at yourself the way others see you.”
Frenchwoman Justine Trieu made a film about the limited vision of “others,” about the subjectivity of perception, about the unreliability of the truth. The courtroom is a place where it is not the truth that is important, but the truth, not life, but its interpretation. Sandra writes auto-fiction; for her, too, only interpretation is important. No one can know anything for sure, no one can express himself. Sometimes it’s a problem of talent – Sandra’s husband never finished his first novel. Sometimes this is a linguistic problem – with her French husband, Sandra is forced to speak in English, because she never really learned French, in court – in French, because these are the requirements of the court.
This is a direct response to Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” – in fact, Saul Bass’s famous poster for Preminger’s film, where a conventional little man either splits into pieces or simply lies motionless, could well have worked for “Anatomy of a Fall.” Trieu admits that her film is an homage to Preminger (and also to Clouzot’s “The Truth,” a film in which she sees “the misogyny of those times”). One can also recall Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct,” where the heroine-writer is either a murderer or not. But Trieu’s film is simpler and therefore scarier: it’s not about sex, it’s not about sexuality, and it’s not about an “irresistible impulse.” There is no complete truth, that’s all.
The drama rests on the amazing Sandra Hüller (“Toni Erdmann” Maren Ade, “Zone of Interest” by Jonathan Glaser), who is equally convincing as a possible murderer with outbursts of anger, and as an obvious victim – of circumstances, relationships, bias. Trieu wrote the script specifically for Hüller.
At times, Trieu’s directorial decisions seem too frontal, she brandishes the verbs “look”, “see” and “hear”, she makes the misogynist accuser truly disgusting, and the psychotherapist witness almost caricatured. More than once the camera peers into Daniel’s blind eyes and into the blue, also seemingly blind, eyes of his guide dog. Trieu in every possible way emphasizes the discrepancy between sound and picture, memories and reality, meaning and meaning, again and again presenting an incomplete – but reliable – picture of what is happening. On an audio recording of a family quarrel, everyone hears what they tuned in to in advance.
Trieu explores the blind spots and soundscape of truth, sometimes distracting from the motives and psychological portrait of the heroine, and such formalism is to her benefit, clearing her cinema from the confusion of previous films. At the center of her semi-absurd drama “In Bed with Victoria” there was also a strong but flighty forty-year-old woman: Victoria defended a possible rapist in court and dealt with her ex-husband, a writer – Justine Trieu was always interested in dogs, autofiction, the judicial system and inequality between men and women , but Anatomy of a Fall says something new about all of this.
For example, if you don’t have enough information to understand what happened, and it’s unbearable for you, you just need to decide which side you’re on. Even if you are not sure about anything, you just need to decide. Will you thus find truth or truth? No. But what you need is not truth, you need peace.
The blind lead the blind, they make video reports for the blind, and the music gets louder. Trieu’s film was criticized at Cannes for the fact that it does not draw any conclusions, does not reach a new level of generalization, but this is the main conclusion of the film: no conclusions can be drawn, no matter how much information you are given. Finally, turn off this music.
In theaters from October 19
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