The title of Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning courtroom drama Anatomy Of A Fall is an obvious reference to a classic genre forebear, Otto Preminger’s 1959 Anatomy Of A Murder. Given her film’s themes and, in particular a superb scene between a warring husband and wife at its heart, it could easily have been Anatomy Of A Marriage.
“When you have the perfect idea for a movie, it’s when two lines are crossing,” suggests Triet. For her, it was the dual desires to make a courtroom drama and “to dive into the nightmare of this couple”, to tackle a relatable domestic crisis through genre.
Anatomy is a genre feast, with domestic drama, murder mystery and psychological thriller all in the mix, as enigmatic German author Sandra goes on trial for the murder of her husband Samuel (played by Samuel Theis), who is found dead outside their isolated French Alpine home, with no-one around but the spouse.
With the compelling Sandra Hüller as the defendant, Triet skilfully withholds information about the state of the marriage until her pièce de résistance: an audio tape of an argument between the couple that suddenly appears in court. The audience gets to see what the jury can only hear.
Triet, who co-wrote the screenplay with her partner Arthur Harari, recalls when this key scene was conceived. “It was during the lockdown. Our family were all together. I said, ‘Okay, everything will be in this one recording, and it will be raw.’ The movie is very complicated and mysterious you don’t know exactly what has happened. This is the only thing that the spectator and the jury have — it’s like a piece of real life.”
But it did not come easily. “I think we had 60 versions of this scene. I was not happy with it — I didn’t care about these people. And if you don’t love your characters, the audience doesn’t care either.
“So we worked on the basis of their argument. And it’s a question of time, of stealing time, because it’s universal. When people split up, they say, ‘I’m wasting my time with this woman, with this man. You steal my time. You owe me five years.’”
For Sandra and Samuel, both ambitious, with a young son (Milo Machado Graner) who needs special care, the specific issue is reciprocity; and for a change, it is the man who feels he is the only one making sacrifices. “Of course, my movie is a little provocative, because I flip the gender,” says Triet. “We were very conscious about that in the writing process; we would laugh a lot about it. In some countries, people are saying, ‘Why is the woman so tough and difficult and unkind’, because it’s crazy for them to see a woman in that position. But we are used to seeing men like this, since I don’t know when… centuries.
“I’m not resolving anything. I just put things on the table, out in the open,” she adds. “There’s a quotation, ‘To be a couple is to be just one person — but which one?’ It could be very interesting to not be ‘just one’, but to find reciprocity.”
Family affair
This is the second script, after 2019 Cannes Competition entry Sibyl, that Triet has written with Harari, an actor, writer and director who has also appeared in a number of her films. Did their own experience feed into Anatomy? She laughs. “Our lives are so boring compared to these people. And Arthur is alive!”
More seriously: “Arthur is my life partner, we have no boundaries to working all the time. [The film] was totally in our lives. And sometimes it was tough for our kids… The main thing is the time. Time is still in our discussion, it’s still a challenge.”
For Triet, this brutal scene is primarily “a battle of ideas” and “the rehearsal for the courtroom”.
The trial itself takes up a substantial part of her film. She cites several influences, from the 2016 documentary Amanda Knox (“very interesting for me, of course, a clever woman who is being judged”), Anatomy Of A Murder and Henri-George Clouzot’s La Vérité (The Truth, 1960). She adds that Richard Fleischer, who directed Orson Welles-starrer Compulsion (1959), “is my god now”.
Anatomy Of A Fall has already struck a chord with audiences, attracting more than one million admissions in France via Le Pacte; $1.6m (£1.25m) at press time in the UK and Ireland for Picturehouse Entertainment/Lionsgate; and $3.4m for Neon in North America. Anatomy Of A Fall has also picked up five nominations at the European Film Awards, including for European film, director and screenwriter.
Like Knox — a US woman convicted and then acquitted of murder in Italy — Sandra is being tried in a country, and in a language, not her own. Triet has spoken of the “civilised violence” that actor Antoine Reinartz brings to the role of the prosecutor. “Language is the centre of this movie — the violent language in the home and sometimes the language of the courtroom, which seems to be kind and pleasant, but words are killing all the time,” she says. “It’s always other people who are speaking instead of Sandra — she is dispossessed of her narrative.”
Which is ironic, given the character is a writer. “Exactly,” says Triet, “she is a successful novelist. Everything she has built in her life, because she is powerful, is turned against her in the courtroom.”
One question raised against Sandra is her tendency to raid her own experiences, and that of others, for her fiction. Triet sees nothing unusual in that. “Yeah, of course, we are vampires,” she smiles, “but not in a bad way.”
The freewheeling discourse of her courtroom, where the permissive examination of witnesses sometimes verges on literary or philosophical debate, may surprise many in the UK and US. Triet says it is true to the French system. “French courtrooms can sometimes be very free. And it was important to me to set this within the reality of France, not a fantasy of US movies.”
This desire may stem from her experience in documentary. Triet — a graduate of Beaux-Arts de Paris — has made documentaries about French presidential elections and student protests; for her first fiction feature, Age Of Panic in 2013, she played out a family drama amid real scenes of election crowds on the Paris streets.
“I have a lot of difficulty with how courtrooms are represented in movies, because it’s like God is talking, and everything is smooth and perfectly hygienic,” she says. “I’ve spent a lot of time in courtrooms and it’s never like this — it’s a mess, the jury are hungry, they want to pee. I tried to put that kind of mess in my courtroom. It was not so easy, because you’re just filming a rectangular space.”
Triet wrote this part especially for Sandra Hüller, after featuring her in a supporting role in Sibyl. “I think there is a paradox in the movie. I wanted Sandra because in real life she is so transparent, so clear, so honest… And I asked her to be ungraspable.”
Is it true that Hüller asked her whether Sandra was a murderer? “Yeah. Two days before the shooting, she was anxious. I was in my room, and she shouts, ‘Tell me now.’ I told her, ‘Just play it like an innocent.’ That was my answer. Maybe in 10 years I will tell her.”
No comments yet