This Cannes Palme d’or winner and Oscar contender has been in UK cinemas for three months and is now available on streamers. I’m late to the party but I’ve just caught it on BFI Player. I watched it only a short time after Dominik Moll’s The Night of the 12th appeared on my Blu-ray rental list, a 2022 prizewinner which is set in the same region of France and in which the French policing and judicial system plays an equally important part. In Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet and co-written by the director and her husband Arthur Harari, the focus is on the court case rather than the search for a ‘perpetrator’. In this case La juge d’instruction decides to prosecute a woman in a case of the suspicious death of her husband who falls from the second attic floor of their chalet in the French Alps. The trial is held in a courthouse in Grenoble and both the investigation and the procedures of the court have baffled audiences outside France – and perhaps some in France as well. Justine Triet and her husband worked with a criminal lawyer to get the details of proceedings correct but in the Press Notes she admits that: “What surprised us was the somewhat disorganised nature of trials in France”. She compares the system to what she sees as the more structured approach of American courts. The difference between the French system and those based on English Common Law causes some confusion for audiences and has led to comments from the US and UK suggesting that this film is silly or unrealistic. But this is also partly because Triet’s narrative refuses to use the conventions of Hollywood narrative filmmaking.
The central character in the film is Sandra, played by the wonderful Sandra Hüller. She’s a successful novelist, originally from Germany, who married a French teacher/lecturer Samuel (Samuel Theis) whom she met while living in London. They married in London and have an 11 year-old son. The family moved to the French Alps partly because Samuel was struggling with his writing and wanted more time to work from home. The couple’s son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) has visual impairment after an accident when he was four and Samuel home-schooled him for part of the time each week. Samuel also expected to renovate the chalet so that it could be rented out. He fell after working in the attic. Sandra writes full time and also supplements the family income with translation work. All this information about the family emerges slowly in the narrative. What becomes clear eventually is that the court hearing will become an investigation of the marriage. Sandra appears to be on trial as a woman who puts her career above the welfare of her family – a charge more usually made against men. The most unusual aspect of this narrative is perhaps the role of her son who is a witness to the life of the family, but a witness with an impairment. The judge who presides over the court makes several decisions that affect Daniel, the most contentious of which is arguably to allow him to be in court to hear evidence about the tensions in the marriage and to learn about incidents of which he wasn’t aware. The judge also appoints a young woman to stay with Daniel all the time, including at home, to ensure that no-one instructs/coaches him in how to give his testimony. Milo Machado Graner’s performance is extraordinary and so is that of his dog Messi.
Anatomy of a Fall is the third French film I have seen recently that focuses on a trial, following The Girl With a Bracelet (2019) and Saint Omer (2022). Each of the three has a female defendant and they are each different in terms of aspects of the procedures of the court. I’ve attempted to research the French system and I found a paper, ‘Investigating homicide investigation in France’ (2013) by a UK sociologist, Charlotte Harris published in Policing and Society. I was struck by this extract from the Abstract of the paper:
The French system remains, despite shifts towards adversarial elements and recurring attacks on the pivotal role of the eponymous Juge d’instruction, one of Europe’s inquisitorial judicial systems, and its structure of judicial supervision of police enquiries and epistemological ethos of truth seeking has periodically been advocated to improve the probity of cases in countries like England with adversarial systems pitting partisan cases supported by discrete pieces of evidence.
The difference between the ‘inquisitorial’ and ‘adversarial’ is partly what makes these dramas different both in structure and in tone/pacing of courtroom incidents. The US/UK trials are more conventionally ‘dramatic’. In France it would seem that representations of criminal investigations and court procedures are more nuanced and variable partly because of the greater leeway given to La juge d’instruction and the President of the court itself in terms of how to conduct the hearing. This is most pronounced in the attempt by L’Avocat Général (the prosecutor, played by Antoine Reinartz) to use the novels written by Sandra as evidence of her attitudes towards her husband. Sandra’s avocat in court is Maître Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) who appears to know Sandra from several years back and he may be in love with her. These personal narrative threads added to the questions of language – Sandra is happy to use English at home because that means both she and Samuel are using their ‘second language’, but the judge insists on aspects of the proceedings of the court must be in French – and Daniel’s role in court are factors which make this an unusual trial.
Anatomy of a Fall works for me because it is very well written and Sandra Hüller is very good indeed. Triet decided to keep the presentation of the film ‘simple’ and that seems to have worked. The local scenery is spectacular, but she doesn’t let it overwhelm the personal dramas of her narrative. The narrative is engaging, not so much because of the mystery to be solved – did he fall, was he pushed or did he jump? – but because of the debates that open up in court about gender, about writing, about who is allowed to speak and in which language etc. If you are looking for a Hollywood-style courtroom drama you may be disappointed and find the narrative dull or even, as some IDMb users claim, ‘boring’. I could not disagree more. Yes, it is long at 151 minutes but I was engaged throughout. Thoroughly recommended.
The Case for Global Film 
I saw this at the Leeds Film Festival last year where it was a bit of a hot ticket. The acting was extraordinary all round, particularly the boy who had a tremendous amount asked of him. It was a more complex story with realistically presented characters, of course, but for me there was a weird hark back to ‘Basic Instinct’ where the potential killer had already signalled her intent in her own works of fiction. I don’t think the central question of whodunnit was ever resolved which may have frustrated some viewers of such a long film. Jehnny Beth, in quite a marginal role as , um, Marge seemed familiar. Now I see she was in ‘Paris 13th District’ which I also saw at Leeds the year before, and preferred on the whole.
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Yes, the role for Jehnny Beth couldn’t be more different than the one in Les Olympiades – unless Marge has a secret other job.
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One problem with the film is that the only sympathetic characters are Daniel and his dog. Be warned there is a bad canine moment.
As for the trial, it may be accurate but I still think it is presented in a way that is unconvincing.
And whilst the outcome may seen ambiguous I am sure that it was actually justified homicide.
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I didn’t find any of the characters particularly unsympathetic. I agree that the trial does appear unconvincing but then I still don’t quite understand the French judicial system. But then all trials (i.e. including those in the UK and US) are difficult to present in a couple of hours or so.
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Saint Omer also gives a picture of a French trial which is rather baffling. I enjoyed Anatomy of a Fall though I wasn’t sure it demonstrated the merits of the inquisitorial approach. Great performances.
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I agree the way the director engages you in debates about gender/family roles and forces you to question your assumptions, is the real point of the film. Although I didn’t like either parent much, my own sympathies shifted throughout. At the start I was absolutely with the wife feeling murderous at her husband blasting 50 Cent’s misogynistic P.I.M.P (powerfully annoying choice of music that I just couldn’t get out of my head), but later I was repelled by her refusal to speak her very good French to her own son when that was his native tongue, as well as her failure to empathise fully with his pain after his father’s death. And finally at the climactic point, my sympathies switched rapidly back and forth between both of them on every line in the riveting flashback/audio row. That’s the mark of a brilliantly written and performed scene, and both actors were utterly convincing as a married couple tearing themselves apart.
However, to engage fully with that debate, I feel we’re asked to accept quite a few implausibilities and clichéd contrivances like the son being conveniently blind and given to symbolically hammering out his unspoken angst on through classical piano pieces to build tension just at the right moments. One of my least favourite ways that some directors use diegetic music….
Even so, my biggest problem with the film was being preoccupied throughout with the way the poor boy, played superbly by Milo Machado Grana, was treated by almost all the adults. I was aghast at the court’s adultification of such a young, already traumatised child – cruelly forcing him to listen to the ugly, violent details of his parents’ behaviour towards each other and to testify, effectively making him ‘choose’ one parent over the other, when he was left with only one choice of ‘truth’. My understanding is that children that young in our own system can give remote or video-recorded testimony, but clearly that’s not the case in the French one – or perhaps it’s at the discretion of the judge. My abiding memory of the film won’t be Sandra Hüller’s performance, excellent though that was, but the young boy actor’s even more extraordinary one, especially when he finally broke. I can’t bear watching young actors having to play harrowing scenes and hope to God he was treated sensitively on set.
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Yes. I too thought that the court’s treatment of the boy was horrendous. French judicial procedures do seem very odd to us. I was intrigued that the filmmaker knew little about the courts before she started on the script. I’m still not sure how plausible the representation of the court might be. Fortunately my knowledge of rap and hip-hop doesn’t extend to all the misogynistic crap that appears in ‘gangsta’ rap and I know nothing about 50 Cent. Not sure about the language issue. I’d need to go back and check but I thought he was growing up bi-lingual in French and English. I forget if he spoke German? What do you think of The Night of the 12th? I thought that was a better film.
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I’d have to go back and check too but I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels the same way about the treatment of the son. I meant to add that interrogating him isolated in the centre of the court made it feel even more like a theatre of of cruelty. And weirdly, if I remember correctly, his mother, the actual suspect, was questioned from her less exposed position at the side of the court.
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