Review: Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Unreliable witnesses and an accused woman as a sphynx

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
Written and directed by Justine Triet
Co-written by Arthur Harari

In “Anatomy of a Fall,” the deteriorating relationship of an unmarried couple ends in the death of the man, who has fallen from a third-level balcony of their ramshackle house in the French Alps to the ground. Their 11-year-old blind son discovers the body; police launch an investigation to determine what happened, and eventually charge the woman, Sandra, for murder. The film follows her trial and its effect on the child, who attends it every day.

Two things struck me when I was watching the film. The first is that the character of Sandra, both as written and as performed by Sandra Hüller, is very complex. She’s reserved, intelligent, a little cold -- though she is capable of gentleness and affection with her son – and hard to read. She is sardonic even with her own lawyer. She isn’t easily likeable and, as a viewer, I found myself with ambivalent feelings toward her.

This is helpful in the film, because at base it’s a mystery: how did her partner Samuel die, through suicide or murder? By making her less than sympathetic, the audience’s own judgement is reserved, able to be swayed one way or the other as details about the fatal incident, and about her life, come out during the trial. We are in doubt about her role in Samuel’s death, even after the verdict is given.

The other thing I was struck by was the French trial system as shown in the film. As someone accustomed to the American trial system as shown by “Law and Order” and any number of other dramas, the way the French system conducts murder trials was often surprising. Instead of carefully limiting statements by witnesses strictly to what can be proven, both the witnesses and the prosecution and defense lawyers seem to have great leeway to introduce and to elicit theories, opinions, and all sorts of evidence that would not be allowed in an American trial. The cross-examination of a witness, even the accused herself, is more of a conversation or debate between the two sides. This may have helped present the facts as a narrative, but as an American viewer I found it generally alarming.

Fortunately, the trial turns not on the succession of feints and stabs by the lawyers, but on the boy Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Without giving away anything, I can say that even if you feel the film is drifting during the trial, wait for the boy’s dramatic testimony at the end.

Competently directed by Justine Triet, who wrote the script with Arthur Harari, the film also uses music very well. Daniel plays a classical piece, Prelude in E Minor by Frédérick Chopin, but his hands aren’t large enough to play both the melody and the left-hand accompaniment, so his mother plays that part, sitting alongside him. It isn’t until the closing credits that we hear the whole thing as a grave comment on the story’s mystery and what its revelation has done to Daniel and to Sandra.