In the funny way that those mini-zeitgeists go, 2023 has managed to be a banner year for UK releases of French courtroom dramas that won major prizes at prestigious European film festivals. First up was Alice Diop’s superb Saint Omer, which won second prize at Venice, and now we have Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, which took home this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes. Though its award was the bigger one, it’s Anatomy of a Fall that comes off the lesser in this encounter, an undoubtedly solid and well-acted procedural about a woman accused of killing her husband, but one that lacks the spiritual or visual poetry of Saint Omer.
This woman is Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) a successful German writer living in the French Alps with her much less successful writer husband Samuel (Samuel Theis). There’s an unhappy tension in this marriage, a tension snapped when Samuel, who had been working in the attic next to an open window, is found dead from a fall by Sandra’s blind son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) on his return from a dog walk while Sandra has, apparently, been asleep in the house. With an accident swiftly ruled out by the police, Sandra’s case is eventually brought to trial, with her indicted for murder while her kindly defence lawyer Vincent (Swann Arlaud) argues that Samuel committed suicide.
From here we get a lot of the ins and outs of the French legal process as well as deep dives into the cracks in Sandra and Samuel’s marriage, all of which get thoroughly explored by the dogged prosecution. Given all the plaudits Anatomy of a Fall has received so far this year, it’s honestly surprising just how conventionally told this story is, though. Though Huller, constantly switching between French and English, is typically excellent and Graner is a spectacular find as a 12 year old boy suddenly thrust into a deeply adult world (the couple’s monetary and sexual problems get a thorough airing in the trial), there’s not much psychological weight, while the various revelations are hardly actually, well, revelatory.
Triet, writing alongside Arthur Harari, does include some fantastically arresting details, though, from a slightly surreal set of reconstructions done by the police, prosecution, and defence as they try to piece together the fall, to the fact that Samuel was playing an ear-splittingly loud steel-drum cover of 50 Cent’s ‘P.I.M.P’ on a loop when he died. These little notes are where Anatomy of a Fall really shines, both immersing you in the inherent absurdities of the legal process and creating a real, lived-in, and amusingly pathetic misery to the central marriage.
At two-and-a-half hours, Anatomy of a Fall does stretch its story a bit thin, but Triet keeps things moving at a quick enough clip that it never feels slow or overly laboured. With a mostly unflashy style – the most visual spectacle you ever really get is in the consistently excellent knitwear – it’s hardly one of 2023’s most memorable films but, for any fans of the procedural genre (who have been rather starved of late), this is a mostly compelling banquet of undemanding entertainment.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 