Movie Review: Anatomy of a Fall

In the United States, "courtroom dramas" typically consist of rousing testimonies, charismatic lawyers putting on a fiery performance in service of their clients and a verdict that leads to the guilty being punished and the innocent being vindicated. While I'm not sure if this is the norm or an outlier for French cinema, Anatomy of a Fall marks a very different approach to this classic crime procedural genre.

The reigning Palme d'Or Winner from writer/director Justine Triet has a classic setup that anybody whose consumed more than a couple of these types of movies or shows has seen countless times before: A woman (Sandra Huller) is arrested and shortly afterwards, put on trial for murder after her husband (Samuel Maleski) is found dead in the snow with a sizable head wound outside their home in the French countryside. She claims it was suicide while the prosecutor argues that she pushed him over the railing of their balcony. What happens outside of the suspected murder and subsequent arrest is anything but traditional.

Triet's approach to this story is more or less the complete inverse of what Americans typically see from this genre. Not only it is completely devoid of theatrics, it's deliberately laced with ambiguity at every turn. There's no smoking gun piece of evidence that provides any clarity as to what happened and the closest thing there is to a witness is the couple's blind son (Milo Machado-Graner) who discovered the body upon returning from a walk with the family's dog. By eliminating any facts that clearly indicate or acquit the accused in the death of her husband, the audience (and jurors for that matter) has to rely on perception and a deconstruction of their marriage as their primary tools to determine the verdict.

Portraying a murder trial and the people at the center of it in such a methodical, grounded fashion proves to be kind of a double-edged sword for Anatomy of a Fall. Triet's straight down the middle writing style and Huller's powerhouse performance do an excellent job of planting seeds that could easily be interpreted as guilt or innocence in both the details of the day of the murder and their marriage on the whole that really challenges the viewer's personal biases and what they want to believe while also highlighting just how difficult it can be to preside over a murder trial that doesn't have any overwhelming evidence at the center of it. At the same time, this approach gives it a pervasive coldness that goes beyond providing a clever shield to obscure the truth of what really happened and into a territory of emotional numbness that reduces the impact of what the film is trying to say about the murky complexities of romantic relationships, the legal system and the convergence of the two. To Triet's credit, she was able to make a legal drama where the emotions are distant and the facts are in the eye of the beholder work. But that dedication to reality and the often unknown truths that come with it is also just unsatisfying enough to bump Anatomy of a Fall down from great to nearly great.                        

Grade: B