In the opening scene of “Anatomy of a Fall,” Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis, “Softie”) blasts music from his attic. It’s a gaudy, steel drum remix of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” that shakes his mountain chalet with every trumpet blare. In the living room, Samuel’s wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller, “The Zone of Interest”) attempts to interview a former student of hers until she hears “P.I.M.P.” repeated for the third time; clearly, it will not let up. They decide to reschedule the interview for some time next week. Minutes later, the couple’s son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner, “Waiting for Bojangles”), returning from a walk with their dog, stumbles upon Samuel’s lifeless and bloody body in the snow, fallen from the chalet above. The music is still playing.
In the year that follows, Sandra is charged with Samuel’s murder and is whisked into a whirlwind of legal drama, hearsay and rampant speculation. Although the show moves with her from the chalet to the courthouse, we still hear the steel drums through the thin walls of the courtroom. The music has not stopped playing, and I doubt it ever will.
“Anatomy of a Fall,” like most crime procedurals, is a movie focused on simple questions. Who, what, when, where, the all-important why and the oft-forgotten how. In a classic crime drama, these questions are answered through the magical detective’s skills of perception and slow examination. “Anatomy of a Fall” is no classic crime drama. It contains no evidence boards, no high-octane interrogations, no chalk cutouts and no central detective. Crime procedurals use perception to answer the big questions — but to director Justine Triet (“Sibyl”), perception is the big question. What do we see and what should be seen? But before that can be answered, Triet must answer a simpler question: How should we see?
To solve this, Triet takes inspiration from a ’90s French film legend who is never a bad source for ideas: Krzysztof Kieślowski (“Three Colors: Blue”). Like Kieślowski, Triet builds the backbone of “Anatomy of a Fall” with long sequences of unobtrusive, old-master-derived camerawork. Cowboys, landscapes, oh-so-many tripods and no handhelds; all simple, yet all precise. With Kieślowski flair, Triet then breaks the monotony with periodic flashes of the strange. Whip pans, slow-mo, high speed, shaky-cam, found footage, drone shots and extreme wides fill Triet’s arsenal of visual goodies. Think the opening scene from “Three Colors: Red” or the wedding from “Three Colors: White” — she features moments of new-wave auteur in an otherwise classically trained picture. Kieślowski did this to emphasize his themes visually, and Triet does the same, using formal (and informal) methods to answer the film’s big question.
In the usual crime flick, the investigation is shot with religious awe, the flashlight of our crusading detective cutting through the fog of mystery. It imbues a sense of power in not just the camera but the audience too. We not only want answers, but we deserve answers. Every last piece of information is decreed through the cinematic mandate of heaven. In “Anatomy of a Fall,” information is given to the point of repulsion. There is no stone left unturned. Marital disputes, therapists, supposed suicide attempts, disabling accidents, sexual scandals: Anything and everything becomes ammunition for both viewers and the prosecution.
Not only is the evidence itself disturbing, but its process of discovery is shot to feel disgusting. Triet uses her “flashes of the strange” with pinpoint precision — they only come when something new is discovered. We watch bodies tumble out of windows from mountaintops miles away like peeping toms. We sift through muddled news reports and digitally compressed police interviews to deem whether or not a marriage was “healthy,” thinking that surely this minute snapshot of life will provide us with enough information to make that judgment call. By making the discovery process look disgusting, the disgust is reflected in us. We are no longer crusaders: We have been reduced to little brothers going through our sister’s diary.
Sandra Hüller imbues in the character Sandra Voyter the complete terror of being in a courtroom-shaped panopticon, coming apart at the seams while attempting to maintain a strong face for not just the prying judge, but the whole world.
As difficult as it is for Sandra, it’s nothing compared to her son Daniel, who not only must recover from his father’s death but also must come to a conclusion about his mother’s culpability. Daniel is the film’s emotional center. He’s the person we return to after each deposition, he bears the brunt of the conflict and at the end of the day, he’s the star witness, for both the prosecution and the defense. Asking all that from any actor is intense, let alone a child actor. Yet, Graner manages to hold it all together and deliver the year’s best performance so far. It’s pretty cliché to call a performance a “tour de force” but since this movie is French, I’m giving myself a pass here.
In one striking scene, we watch Daniel break down in the gallery during the examination of an especially harrowing piece of evidence. All around him are strangers, dropping in on the trial as a mode of entertainment, grinning and whispering to each other as the juicy details of a dead man’s marriage become subject to speculation. These people are the same as us, laughing and gossiping about the newest true crime case in the news. Like “Killers of the Flower Moon” earlier this month, “Anatomy of a Fall” exists as an exercise in condemning itself and those who watch it, with each private detail entering the public record and each act involved becoming sensationalized.
The characters exist in a superposition of the extreme, robbed of their normality and built into living themes and monuments, broadcast all over France’s airways. Samuel is not simply a lost, dearly-beloved father. At once he is lazy and hardworking, loving and monstrous, power-hungry and powerless, happy and suicidal. Sandra is not simply a flawed-but-caring mother. She is manipulative and abused, sexually deviant and softly caring, hidden away and wholly controlling. During the trial, we are forced to return to the question asked implicitly by the film: What do we see? Justine Triet has an answer: We see too much.
To the prosecution, Samuel’s blaring music driving off a colleague was a conscious choice intended to mock Sandra, leaving her enraged enough to do the unthinkable. To the defense, it was the final, desperate vie for control by a deeply troubled man before he commit an act from which he could never return. But maybe the truth is simpler. Maybe it’s sadder. Maybe Samuel just liked music.
Daily Arts Writer Rami Mahdi can be reached at rhmahdi@umich.edu.