After winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and passing through the Locarno festival on the Piazza Grande, Anatomy of a Fall finally lands at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where it is currently screening.
A suspenseful thriller revolving around the masterful performance of Sandra Huller, here as a successful writer investigated for the mysterious death of her husband, which occurred after a fall from the very top floor of their villa in a French countryside. A place where the German writer had retired with her family, so that the man could find the artistic inspiration he had been lacking for a long time, and their son could grow up in peace, after an accident took most of his sight. It’s him – Daniel – who finds his father’s corpse and who will subsequently be sucked into the vortex of the investigations. In fact, he possibly overheard a fight between his parents that very morning, which will make him a decisive factor in his mother’s destiny.
A destiny that is to be decided, firstly based on the analysis of that fateful fall, which is conducted with the aseptic precision of an anatomopathologist. Hence, the title. And secondly, the motive that could have led her to the potential murder.
The film is not only a meticulous and maddening analysis of the trajectory of the few meters that were fatal to the character. It’s mostly the relationship of the two spouses that gets to be dismantled in the courtroom. The rape of the intimacy of the former couple is the real strength of the opera – which mostly revolves around a basic assumption: the multiplicity of points of view and the impossibility of the truth to be reached. How can you know what and who to believe? A meditation that after Rashomon is no news to cinema, but that rarely ceases to be enticing. Especially nowadays, when the reality of relativism, but mostly of having to surrender to the unknown is perhaps more pressing than ever. We live in the era of science, and of the blind trust in it. We demand for constant explanation, and when this is lacking, we feel deceived. Also, the enlargement of the personal space that individualistic societies bring as a feather in the cap, doesn’t seem to be matched by an equal extension of the private space. Quite the opposite. Social media and the advancement of the control of technology, leave no more room for privacy. And this is also – if not mostly – a film about privacy. To defend herself from the accusation, the defendant must give it up, and share the deepest secrets of her heart.
That is why the film is particularly timely and urgent nowadays. Perhaps everyone can relate to the Kafkian nightmare that the protagonist is forced to live, but we may relate to the feeling of being observed and forced to be at the mercy of an undesired audience intruding into our private affairs. Also, it’s hard not to feel for the protagonist, as the performance of Sandra Hüller is so real and breathtaking that it makes the almost three hours of the movie pass unnoticed.
This said, the film is flawed for many reasons. Had some details been treated differently, it could have been an opera worth the award it won. Its main flaw can be summed up in few words: the first part is catchy, the second a looping repetition of the first, falling into the mistake of a reassuring and clear ending.
A swirling style opens the scene. The deafening volume of the pop music, the insistent close-ups, the tight editing, the catchy, wise-cracking dialogue. And then later the alternation between moments filmed by the police cameras, belonging to the diegetic material, and the ones belonging to the director’s framing. We are talking about clever stylistic choices, which contributed largely in keeping the viewer in suspense and to impart a specific confused feeling: we don’t know whether Sandra is guilty or not. Too bad these choices were not dosed just right. The use of the dual camera was a simple narrative device abandoned almost immediately, substituted by moments of flashbacks that sometimes were effective, sometimes dragged along for almost no reasons. The second part becomes endless, a banal repetition of the same concept, and thus results are predictable.
What could have effectively saved the movie, would have been an open ending. Instead, Justine Triet chooses to be reassuring. Not only does she decide to close the case – which was in fact a good option, but she wants to bring some clarity to the facts. After the trial has put their relationship to test, the final reconciling hug between mother and son tells us that Sandra is (probably) innocent. This clearly depowered the film, which was benefitting from being puzzling and disconcerting and then became comforting, at the very last minute. Triet fell in the trap of a reassuring ending. This led Anatomy of a fall to stray from being an opera about the impossibility of knowing, towards being an opera about the difficulty of it.
In short, the Palme D’Or 2023 is for sure a cool and intriguing film, but a tepid one that most likely will not make it to history.
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