anatomy of a fall (w&d justine triet, w. arthur harari)

[Warning, spoiler!] So, the blind kid’s anecdotal testimony swings the trial and gets his mum off a murder charge. The implausibility of this only helps to reveal the effectiveness of Triet’s clever  courtroom drama, (which isn’t really a courtroom drama). This is actually a movie about relationships more than anything else. Principally, Sandra’s relationship with her dead husband, her son and her lawyer. What are the limits to a relationship? Is trust more important than truth? Do conventional ideas about marriage have any real bearing on how relationships actually work?

It’s curious that the script goes for the Rambertian decision to give the married couple the same first names as the actors who play them. There is much play made towards the latter part of the film and trial of the fact that Sandra’s life has echoes in her fiction, and that within the fiction might be found the truth of what happened on the day Samuel, her husband, died. In truth, this, like many of the strands in Anatomy, is slightly loose, an idea that is teased into our consciousness as we watch, without really going anywhere. Which is perhaps just as well, because had the film relied on this plank too much, it might have turned into a Branagh adaptation of Agatha Christie. In a similar way to the fact that Sandra’s charming lawyer, the baleful Swann Arlaud, is someone who was once in love with her. There’s no narrative reason for this to be the case, but it adds another ingredient to this complex soup of a film, which succeeds in part because so much mud is thrown at the wall that things are bound to stick. The lengthy argument scene, the only time Samuel speaks, is a fish out of the film’s water (perhaps reminiscent of the dialogue scene in Hunger), another of these quietly random elements that are stuck together to construct a film which …

Which ultimately talks, as so many great films do, about society. It’s reminiscent of Farhadi’s A Separation, a film that took us inside the Iranian legal system to offer a sweeping portrait of its society. It feels as though Triet is using the theatricality of the courtroom as a lever to prise open questions about love, relationships, and how we, in the west, live now. The little lies which help to construct the basket within which we float down the stream. The legal interpretation of our actions and these lies, which is the codification of our morality, ends up being an instrument of blunt force, with which society attempts to perform its autopsies. The actuality of our actions and our lies lie beyond the law’s scope of true understanding. Sandra’s deceits may be innumerable and suggest guilt; her innocence or purity can only be inferred from her unreliable son’s unlikely tale, which is a form of love that transcends justice.