Justine Triet’s acclaimed courtroom drama is not a whodunnit in the classic sense, but its basic appeal is the same. The mystery is whether the dead person, a French academic, was murdered by his wife, a German writer who, while not rich, was widely published. This dynamic, we are reminded again and again, seemed to cause her husband considerable anguish, since he has been struggling for years just to complete one novel. The resulting friction is illustrated blatantly in the first scene. As the wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), answers a graduate student’s questions about her work in the couple’s chalet in Grenoble, the husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), blasts music upstairs, making the interview impossible. Sometime later, the couple’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), discovers his father’s dead body in the blood-splattered snow after having apparently fallen from the chalet’s third-story window. The question becomes: Did he jump or was he pushed?

The police and, subsequently, the local prosecutor believe it’s the latter, and that it was Sandra who did the pushing. What follows is the usual mix of forensic fussiness—one of the best sequences is a reenactment of the death using dummies—and legalistic cunning, and in that regard Anatomy of a Fall isn’t particularly distinctive. Its mojo is centered on the way it projects the details of the incident onto the couple’s marriage, which is exposed mercilessly in public. Triet, in fact, misses a valuable chance to interrogate media complicity by only cursorily indicating the press mob outside the courtroom. She doesn’t even seem to be that concerned with Sandra’s innocence or guilt in a purely legal sense. She’s more interested in Sandra’s fitness, in the eyes of everyone involved, as a wife, as a mother, and even as an intellectual. As the adversarial nature of the marriage becomes apparent through testimony from Samuel’s psychiatrist and recordings that Samuel made of his conversations with Sandra for a book he was writing—including one quite violent argument that the jury can’t see but which Triet obligingly stages for us—Sandra is left with no defense of her own character, even though it’s clear that any evidence the prosecution has against her in terms of committing murder is circumstantial. And that seems to be the point of the movie. The literally bull-headed prosecutor acts as both sexist foil, accusing Sandra of emasculating Samuel by publishing nonstop in the face of Samuel’s writer’s block, and literary critic, combing through her own work for hints of her pathology. 

It’s therefore anti-climactic that the decisive testimony comes from Daniel, whose role throughout the drama is that of a beleaguered person-of-interest, sitting glumly in the courtroom listening to people say terrible things about his parents and trying to make sense of it. When it’s his turn to tell his story, he brings up a matter that only adds to the mystery but nevertheless points to something neither the prosecution nor the defense counted on. And while it’s a clever, meaningful touch, it deflates the mystery, leaving the viewer without much to dwell on. As a dissection of an unstable marriage—moreover one between two writers (compare it to Past Lives, which is anemic in that regard)—Anatomy of a Fall is honest and unusually incisive, but framing it as a murder mystery sparks expectations it can’t satisfy.

In English and French. Opens Feb. 23 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060).

Anatomy of a Fall home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 L.F.P. – Les Films Pelléas/Les Films de Pierre/France 2 Cinéma/Auvergne-Rhöne-Alpes Cinéma