Anatomy of a Fall (2023) - Anatomy of a relationship
Credit: allocine.fr
In a chalet buried deep in the mountains of Grenoble, a woman stands next to her open fridge, crying. An old friend, the man who is to represent her during the trial concerning her husband’s possible murder, watches her, calmly waiting for it to stop. It is perhaps in this single scene that the power of Justine Triet’s impeccably tense courthouse drama Anatomy of A Fall – and of its leading actress Sandra Huller – seeps through, quietly, slyly, easy to miss if one were to look away for a split second.
In this very same chalet, a man has fallen – from a balcony, from a window? – and died, his blood soaking the snow beneath him. His partially blind son, Daniel (a shockingly emotive Milo Machado-Graner), is the first to find him, his wife, Sandra, soon follows. In the aftermath, the quiet of their cozy nook starts to have a reverse effect and Sandra is quickly suspected of his murder, rapidly forced into a whirlwind of rehearsed interviews, strangers entering her home, media attacking her from all sides.
There is not a second to breathe in this tour de force, in which performance, atmosphere and dialogue collide magnetically, leaving a deep-seated sense of untrustworthiness in their paths. Indeed, as the trial progresses, a gust of evidence is laid down like a blanket of fresh snow, the most significant being the fact that Sandra is a writer, able to twist and manipulate the court to her liking. Her writing, eerily autobiographical, reflects her loathing of her husband when read aloud to the court, much to the smug pleasure of the prosecution. When does reality stop and fiction begin? Even flashbacks, featuring an equally breathtaking Samuel Theis as the deceased, have a falsehood to them, as do Sandra’s reactions to each and every event as the trial deepens and complicates. At some point, one is not even sure when, Anatomy of A Fall stops being about whether Sandra murdered Samuel. As their marriage is torn apart by the court, the focus shifts to what their relationship was “truly” like. And, from the first scene to the last, it is clear that it was quite something.