The more one follows the path of cold, radiant realism, the more the truth about the event narrated recedes and dissolves. What the viewer experiences is a sublime and paradoxical perceptual short circuit Anatomy of a fallFilm by the French director Justine Triet, Palme d’Or at the last Cannes Film Festival and currently in Italian cinemas. Courtroom drama almost through inertia, Bergman-esque exploration of the page and the underlying, vague appearance of a highbrow thriller with a resolution that doesn’t actually happen, even when it seems to come.
“Anatomy of a Fall” deserves all the attention and anticipation it demands from the viewer from the first fragments of the story, when the first possible truth about the events that happened is stitched together. In the living room of a chalet in the snow-capped French Alps, experienced writer Sandra (Sandra Hueller) is subjected to an interview with a literature graduate. On the first floor, his 11-year-old visually impaired son Daniel is trying to bathe his dog Snoop. In the attic, her husband Samuel turns on the stereo and plays PIMP by 50 Cent on an endless loop. A disruptive action that Sandra apparently tolerates until the interview is interrupted and postponed to a later time and place. In time with a cut, Daniel returns from the walk as Snoop literally collides with his father’s corpse, belly up on the front doorstep, fatal bruise on the temple, nosedive downward from the top of the chalet. It is inevitable that the first suspect to be immediately charged with murder is Sandra herself.
A lawyer friend who is elegantly in love with her will help her, as will her son’s hesitant testimony. With the field stripped of any melodramatic nuance, Anatomy of a Fall presents itself at first glance as Cinema of clear, hard, unambiguous recognition, the accurate reconstruction of the unseen and unsaid through the layers and phases of the process. A gradual accumulation of information that covers the disagreements and quarrels in the marriage, Samuel’s mental suffering, Sandra’s betrayal and bisexuality, but above all the status differences that arise between the couple (she is a successful writer, he is a failed novelist). hitting the wall of the impossibility of clearly defining the truth.
Triet, with inexhaustible punctuality, harmonizes various sources of vision with impeccable realism (the video cameras of the judiciary, the presence of televisions, the wide angle in the courtroom, which seems like a subjective view of the spectator present) and of sound (the sudden and surprising). Appearance of the audio files from Samuel’s smartphone, Daniel’s voice replacing his father’s voice in the foreground in his statement in a flashback) to force us to constantly resonate with the intangibility of the truth. The more prosecutors, defense attorneys and protagonists go deeper with their confident interventions and reveal broad traces of the past that have long served as a daily and intimate prologue to the fatal fall, the more the truth about Samuel’s death escapes and becomes subjective, even unknown . Dramaturgically and procedurally, we come across false intuitive connections, assumptions as ends in themselves, hypotheses, statements like “we are forced to interpret“. And the final verdict becomes the result, and this really sends shivers down your spine, of a precise party-political decision and not of an objective solution ultimately found. Apart from a blatant abuse of the law by the investigating judge, ready to prove his guilt by constantly forcing violence (the fact is clearly staged), “Anatomy of a Fall” seems to be the result of a cinema that has a darker and more decisive Grace wants to tremble the feeling of guilt of the human soul, of family and social responsibility, as well as the difficult digestion of the fact that a woman, instead of the eternal man, leads the game of professional and public success.
Triet controls and refines the work down to the smallest detail, from that extra half-second on Daniel’s face to the tracking of the semicircle around the prosecutor’s stand, from the blurring of the extras in the foreground while wearing headphones, to the simultaneity of the translation worn in the classroom to the dumping of ruffles in the protagonists’ clothing. This is also a way to underline the absolute wonder of Huller, a German actress, here in a bilingual French-English version, who bursts into an incredible range of facial micro-expressions that would make any colleague even older than her. Drives Teodora away.