Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023).
Anatomy of a Fall (2023) begins with a black screen and an auditory fragment: a short exchange between writer Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) and a young student who’s come to interview her about her career. When the film’s image and sound come into sync, both of them realize that the student’s phone has failed to record their conversation. Reality, seemingly, starts only when the “record” button has been pressed.
We never see the titular fall in Justine Triet’s courtroom drama, only a corpse. The moment when Sandra’s husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), plunges to his death from the attic of their chalet is presented only in simulations, both speculative flashbacks based on courtroom testimony and technical reenactments from expert witnesses. Though a trial is ostensibly a search for the truth, Triet's film is a metacinematic treatise on epistemology, showing only so much as to create ambiguity; each piece of audiovisual evidence only confirms a fragment of what really happened. Whether Samuel’s death was accidental, a suicide, or whether he was pushed to it by Sandra, here on trial for murder, is ultimately up to the audience, for there exists no objective, irrefutable evidence to confirm any version of the story. As the film glides through a myriad of mediated realities, we never gain access to a palpable truth. Samuel himself is mostly an imagined ghost; he appears diegetically only as a dead body, though he is resurrected in mediated formats like photographs, video recordings without sound, and sound recordings without image. Otherwise, he appears in subjective flashback sequences triggered by courtroom testimony—sometimes the characters are trying to fill in the gaps of the case themselves, and we’re watching them imagine what might have happened to Samuel, a projection of their private speculations rather than the facts.
These systematic recreations and unreliable accounts treat truth like volatile matter, and constantly underline not only the camera’s failure to capture reality, but also the faults in human perception itself. What may initially seem perfectly credible later becomes hard to believe. Proof, be it images, words, or recordings, turns out to be fragmentary and imperfect, and all of the witnesses are either biased or lack the complete picture, much like the viewer. Sandra obsessively repeats, to the court, to her lawyers, and even to her son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), that what they are hearing, from her and from others, is only a “part of reality.” At one point, Sandra’s lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), almost scornfully retorts, “I don’t give a fuck about what is reality.” The mission of this particular trial isn’t to determine reality, after all, but to invent a kind of truth, to build up a story that seems most believable and to perform it in court so as to satisfy the jury and judge. For the prosecutors, this trial is a story—stress, story—about a woman who has killed her husband; for the defense, it is one about a husband’s suicide.
The tragedy of this trial, and so of the marriage, is that for one of the spouses to emerge as innocent, the other must fall. For Sandra to win the trial, she must allow Samuel to be slandered, and for Samuel to be a victim, Sandra must be guilty, painted as an awful woman—even if neither of them truly hated the other. It matters little to the law if, in fact, Hüller’s character is actually a woman grieving the accidental death of her husband or, even more painfully, coming to terms with his suicide.
What Sandra should really concern herself with, Vincent suggests, is how others perceive her. In one instance during the trial, it is revealed that Sandra has been lying about how she got a bruise on her hand. Is this sufficient to suspect that she has been lying for the whole trial—that she is a murderer? It is all a matter of where in the courtroom the viewer places themselves, a game of sympathies rather than of hard facts. This trial is fueled by fantasmes, as Vincent aptly calls them, mere fabrications of what could never be understood.
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023).
Courtroom dramas often thrive on narrative suspense and thespian-friendly outbursts, a cathartic “You can't handle the truth!” delivered at a breaking point. The courtroom is by its nature a performative space: convincing depositions have a particular oratorical quality to them, the prosecutors and the defendants could be perceived as actors, there’s an audience in the public gallery, the jury and the judge are akin to critics who need to be convinced, the trial takes place within a clearly delineated stage, and so on. These formalities and procedures invite an atmosphere of pretense. French courts are less entwined with showmanship and popular entertainment than American courts are—in the U.S., there’s a tradition of court shows and high-profile broadcast trials that unfold in a manner akin to reality TV, whereas European courts rarely allow cameras inside. Yet there are plenty of procedural theatrics in Anatomy of a Fall; aside from the historical influence France has had over the methodology of law, the fact that French lawyers, and not only judges, wear robes in court imbues the trial with an immediate sense of ritual and tradition, a rather striking contrast in pomp with the more business-formal attire of their American counterparts.
Triet employs a rhetoric-heavy approach that heightens the court’s natural emphasis on performance, sustained by the fact that the two principal lawyers in the film behave like farcical opposites. The prosecuting attorney goes out of his way to be pedantic, overbearing, a caricature of villainy, accentuated by Antoine Reinartz’s brilliantly intense delivery. At the other end, Swann Arlaud’s Vincent Rezi is poetic and particularly charismatic, a gentle and affable presence outside of the courtroom. A platonic friend of Sandra’s from several years ago, he’s a potential love interest for her now, bearing just the smallest resemblance to her likewise gray-haired dead husband, while his discreet (if mostly rebuffed) confessions and gestures of his affection for her make him even more endearing. This almost archetypal antithesis between the two attorneys renders the trial as a game of trying to catch each other out on technicalities.
If Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) sought murder in the millimeters of the image, Triet looks for it in the corners and semantics of sentences. Within the court, there are fewer moments of conversation or interrogation, and more theatrical, standalone monologues and theoretical suppositions regarding what may have happened. Lengthy shots of characters, often alone in the frame, deliver either nitpicky debates on words such as “unlikely” and “improbable,” or narrative retellings of their entire lives. The most striking one is perhaps Vincent’s interpretation of Samuel’s last few months, a passionate monologue to which even Sandra objects when he returns to his box: “That was not Samuel.”
Both lawyers are very good with words, but the prosecutor seems to be allowed a greater (and wilder) degree of speculation about Sandra’s inner life and motivations—arguments that amount to character assassination. The judge intervenes less with him than with Vincent, revealing, perhaps, a certain bias for his style of argument and perspective. Reinartz’s lawyer is explosive, exaggerative, setting traps and putting words in people’s mouths: there’s a deliberate stagecraft that aims to discredit Sandra (as a wife, as a mother, and as a writer) less through fact and more through rhetoric. To some extent, one could say the prosecutor takes his role too seriously, as he appears to bear some personal enmity toward Sandra as much as her lawyer. Vincent is, by comparison, more composed, even dainty, trying to impress the court through poetic charm rather than aggression.
Top: Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023). Bottom: Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959).
Their way of interacting with each other, but also with the court, clearly evokes Anatomy of a Fall’s namesake, Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Preminger follows a similarly volatile trial, in which a young soldier, Lieutenant Manion, is judged for killing a innkeeper who, Manion suggests, raped his wife. As the only thing that is certain is that the murder has happened, his lawyer, Paul Biegler (James Stewart), uses temporary insanity to justify the action and hopefully win the case. Stewart’s character often appears more like a stand-up comedian than a dutiful lawyer, and his strategy depends heavily on making the audience laugh or terrorizing the more conservative parties in the court by introducing the word “panties” into the record. Much in the same manner, both Reinartz’s obnoxious lawyer and Vincent try to assert dominance by landing witty jokes. Just like Biegler, Triet’s lawyers—most often Vincent—easily get carried away by their rhetoric, so much that the judge must frequently intervene to warn against their poetics.
Both films play with the malleability of fact and the idea that a case is won by the better story; nonetheless, Preminger is more interested in the elasticity of law and morals than in the failings of perception. Lieutenant Manion has clearly committed murder—he’s even vaguely boastful about it—yet Preminger’s film questions to what extent this murder can be excused. If judged against his own moral compass, the Lieutenant was quite in the right to avenge the rape of his wife. If Lieutenant Manion was temporarily insane, as Biegler concocts to exploit the law, then the nature and meaning of this event changes completely.
Like Triet, Preminger also comments on gender roles and the social perception of women, although his film’s discourse on femininity is heavily rooted in its era. Preminger touches on notions of subservience and shame that are traditionally associated with female sexuality, particularly through Laura Manion’s character, who is often subjected to crude, prejudiced, and patronizing comments from the men in the film (although not Biegler). Much like Sandra, Laura’s faithfulness to her husband is also put on trial, with implications that she provoked the rape for which Lieutenant Manion sought revenge: the prosecutors sometimes treat her, rather than her husband, like the criminal who needs to be brought to justice.
Sandra, too, may seem guilty to audiences who are preconditioned to believe that a wife would readily kill her husband, but Triet's film deals with more contemporary questions about gender roles. The opening credits of Anatomy of a Fall comment on the apparent reversal of gender roles in Sandra’s relationship: a montage of old photographs presents her with a tomboyish haircut, whereas Samuel appears with long hair. It is Sandra who is the successful writer, while Samuel complains that he’s been relegated to a domestic role and can’t concentrate on his career. And yet, as if reprimanded for not staying within the limits of her gender, Sandra is vilified for her success and for her so-called “masculine” tendencies by the prosecutors, by the media, and most painfully by her husband, who blames her for his own problems as much as the problems they have as a couple.
Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022).
Triet’s exploration of gender roles—and particularly the unspoken question of whether Sandra is a good mother—calls to mind another recent courtroom film, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022). Based on the real-life trial of a woman of Senegalese origin who killed her infant daughter, Diop’s film, like Anatomy of a Fall, suggests that there are things that cannot be rationally explained or understood through courtroom proceedings. As the defendant, Laurence Coly, can only explain why she resorted to murder in terms of sorcery, Saint Omer further underlines the sociocultural frameworks through which we define notions like reality, knowledge, or evidence. While the film evokes an observational documentary in style and rhythm, Diop isn’t interested in determining truth, either, but in discussing broader issues surrounding motherhood, womanhood, and ethnic identity in France. Guilt is less important than the systemic and conditional forces that presaged the crime.
The trial draws out the prejudices of its audience and participants: witnesses look down on Laurence because of her African origin, and her eloquence in French seems suspicious to some. Her relationship with the father of the child also highlights an imbalance in power—in their own lives as unhappy lovers, but also in the eyes of the court: he’s a man, he’s white, he’s “true-born” French and much older than her, so he may elicit a different level of credibility and authority. The mention of sorcery, which to the white prosecutors sounds like a convenient excuse and to Laurence’s mother a most profound reality, reveals an impasse where one group condescends to another, not prepared to understand or even consider them because they belong to a different culture.
Diop constructs an overall sympathetic sentiment in her film—Saint Omer is less concerned with the suspense of proving the culprit’s guilt than with the hidden nuances of her plea; the trial is principally about a woman who has been marginalized for her entire life being allowed to genuinely speak—and be listened to—for the first time. The main character of the film is not Laurence, but an observer: from the beginning, the viewer is aligned with Rama, a writer researching the trial for her book, much like how Diop was also present in the audience for the real-life trial on which her film is based. This alignment creates a form of kinship, particularly through Rama’s drawing of parallels between Laurence’s life and her own.
In a manner that suggests theatrical soliloquies, characters look into the camera as they testify, as if they are appealing directly to Rama and to the viewer—particularly to a viewer who may relate more personally to the film’s considerations of womanhood, but also of ethnic identity, cultural experience, and racial prejudice. As Laurence’s lawyer stresses in her closing remarks, the trial may deliver nothing more than a verdict, and not actual justice. In Saint Omer there is a suggestion that justice shouldn’t seek to convict, to punish, but to correct wrongs, to weigh actions.
This irrelevancy of a verdict makes a compelling parallel with Anatomy of a Fall, in which, likewise, the conditions that led to the fall are more important than the circumstances of the fall itself. As Daniel explains in his testimony, when one lacks concrete evidence of something, one must go beyond and look for why it has happened.
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023).
Anatomy of a Fall goes beyond a genre-locked courtroom drama and shares a postmodern suspicion about representation, media, and images with studies of relativity, like the aforementioned Blow Up or The Conversation (1975). The burden of proof in Triet’s murder mystery is also a metacinematic one—do you really need to see something in order to believe it?
The fact that Daniel is visually impaired echoes this ontological tension within Anatomy of a Fall’s structure, between what one can or cannot see. The boy’s way of interacting with his family and surroundings questions the primacy of the image in our way of experiencing the world, further underlining how the camera is by no means an omniscient entity but a mediator of subjective realities. The images that come and go throughout the film—media coverage of the trial, the flashbacks, or the reenactments filmed by the police—all seem inferior to the kind of truth to which Daniel is attuned, one that escapes empirical evidence. The image has failed in Anatomy of a Fall: it is an unreliable medium, unable to penetrate emotional and sociocultural subtleties. Yet the failure of the image is also the failure of language; neither words nor images can testify to Sandra's central dilemma: “How can you prove someone is your soulmate?”
Triet’s film follows a fairly classical dramatic structure, yet its multitude of unreliable images evoke a contemporary world oversaturated with audiovisual media. The courtroom drama has always dramatized the manipulation of information in the construction of a story, or a life. However, the internet, and social media in particular, provide other means to shape and exaggerate narratives, to present a certain version of oneself to the world. With cameras in our pockets, we film ourselves and our surroundings almost by reflex. There are so many tools for documenting and scrutinizing the real world, but none are able to accurately represent the more elusive nuances of everyday life. Technological advances have allowed for the increasingly easy fabrication of images and versions of the truth. Anatomy of a Fall avoids the most contemporary issues of media trickery, such as the current debate around AI, harkening back to more classical and general questions about perception—but it certainly echoes a greater modern landscape where truth and falsehood have become more difficult to tell apart. If we ever conceived of the camera as an objective tool, Triet argues for its lack of credibility and for a frame within which—as in her narrative feature debut, Age of Panic (2013)—reality and fiction are not mutually exclusive.
Triet makes it rivetingly hard to ascertain the nature of her film's images, which places an interpretive burden on the viewer. At the decisive moment in the trial, Daniel appears to have remembered a conversation with his father about death, an exchange which could be interpreted as a display of suicidal thoughts. During the flashback, we see Samuel, but hear Daniel speaking in his stead. Whatever allegiance the viewer has chosen throughout the trial will determine the nature of this image: if they think Samuel committed suicide, then this is a reliable memory; if not, then this is another fabrication.
Anatomy of a Fall revels in these Schrödingerian images, able to carry multiple meanings at once. The most malleable piece of evidence in the film is, ironically, that which should have the greatest level of credibility. The audio recording of the couple having an argument, and an implied physical fight with sounds of crashing plates, could either be understood as a display of Samuel’s ardent desire to reclaim his life out of a stifling marriage, as the prosecution argues, or it could sound like a man on the brink, depressed and desperate. Crucially, Triet treats this audio recording as both a flashback and an in-court moment, cutting away from the flashback to the courtroom just as the two are implied to become violent—we hear clanging, breaking, and hitting. The director decides that this is as far as the viewer “can see,” which is perhaps the most demonstrative authorial intervention in the entire film. Sandra offers an explanation as to which sounds correspond to them hitting each other, and which came from Samuel hitting himself or the wall. Yet to a skeptical viewer, this seems not to be an isolated incident, but irrefutable proof of an irreparable marriage.
Triet’s film is particularly contemporary in how it fits into the discourses about modern relationships and cultural perceptions of women, yet its interest in questioning onscreen reality allows it to pose deeper, theoretical questions about recorded media. Just as nuances can be lost in translation from English to French, so too does the camera leave out greater truths. If a traditional murder plot compels the audience to search for a smoking gun, Anatomy of a Fall confounds that impulse. The question of guilt becomes irrelevant because it is impossible to determine, and deliberately so on Triet’s part; there’s only so much that you are allowed to see. And yet visible truth is irrelevant, too, because in this era of overexposure to the image, we seem to be yearning for something untouched, for something which has been hidden from the domineering reign of hypervisibility. Instead of inviting the audience to find the cracks in the case, it revels in them; Anatomy of a Fall is an ode to relativity, human imperfection, failing memories, and the epistemological curse of perception.