Review: Anatomy of a Fall is a deliberate study in uncertainty
Sudden deaths have a way of activating the imagination. When a person’s life ends without warning, there’s often the compulsion among survivors to account for or even justify the loss. In Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a pedestrian monk witnesses the deaths of twelve people from a collapsing bridge, and sets about trying to identify a spiritual significance for their otherwise arbitrary demise. In Otto Preminger’s Laura, a sophisticated young career woman’s horrific murder inspires her blue collar investigator to, in the words of another character, “fall in love with a corpse.” And in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the overnight disappearance of a woman across the way prompts a wheelchair-bound James Stewart to speculate that she must have met a treacherous end. (It’s part of that movie’s neat elusion of reality that Stewart turns out to be correct.)
Our brains are designed to delineate meaning; in the absence of concrete facts, or coherence, the mind steps in to fill the gaps. Of course, what our brains come up with may have no basis in reality – but what is reality if not some thin understanding of life agreed upon by a majority of people?
What happens when only one person can account for “reality,” and what happens when that person’s account is called into question?
These are the ambiguities that motivate Anatomy of a Fall, a deliberate study in uncertainty that prompts its audience to interrogate their own relationship to “story,” and how stories are constructed. Sandra Hüller is Sandra Voyter, a writer who lives in a cabin along the French Alps with her feckless husband, Sam (Samuel Theis), and their partially-blind son, Danny (Milo Machado-Graner). One day, while Danny walks the family dog, Sam falls from the roof of their cabin and dies. During the ensuing investigation, Sandra, who was home at the time, claims that she was napping when her husband fell. But certain forensic inconsistencies lead prosecutors and the general public to suspect that she may have pushed him.
Did she do it? And, more importantly, how can she convince her doubters that she didn’t?
To a certain degree, I was impatient with Anatomy of a Fall. From a legal standpoint, there’s no sound case with which to convict Sandra of murder: police never uncover any evidence that directly implicates her, and the prosecution’s argument hinges entirely on circumstantial or speculative details. But this is also entirely the point; director Justine Triet and co-scriptwriter Arthur Harari do an excellent job of highlighting not only the human impulse to narrativize events that escape clarity, as Sandra’s detractors and even her own friend and lawyer (Swann Arlaud) do, but the readiness with which people still move to condemn or punish women.
It seems to me that Anatomy of a Fall belongs in a spiritual trilogy with Tár (2022) and The Power of the Dog (‘21), two recent movies that also position women or otherwise femme-queer protagonists in scenarios where their actions, either clearly or ambiguously, stand at direct odds with predisposed notions of ethics. Whether it’s Cate Blanchett’s esteemed classical conductor facing allegations of sexual misconduct, or Kodi Smit-McPhee’s wallflower adolescent poisoning his mother’s bully with anthrax, these stories invite viewers into nebulous moral quandaries that complicate queer “empowerment” by framing their queer characters as unscrupulous or manipulative.
This is no less true of Sandra in Anatomy of a Fall, who, early in the film, flirts with a woman interviewer, and is revealed to be bisexual during her trial. Now, one may ask whether it’s helpful for movies to disseminate visions of queer people as homicidal maniacs, just as one may question the ubiquity of revenge as a mainstream trope in “feminist” entertainment. (I’ll cite Gone Girl, ‘14, and Promising Young Woman, ‘20, as troubling entries in that latter trend as well.) But whereas, for instance, Power of the Dog unfurls like a tableau of voyeuristic psychosexual manipulation – an exploitation of queerness, if it you will – Anatomy of a Fall is, among other things, a meditation on our cultural predilection for associating bisexuality with duplicity, and for interpreting women’s agency, sexual or otherwise, as deviant or offensive.
At a certain point in this movie, one wonders whether Sandra is on trial for murdering her husband, or for hurting his ego. She insists that she did not kill him; there is no evidence to back up the claim that she did. Yet she must stand trial, if for no other reason than that she strikes those around her as someone who could be guilty.
Guilty of something that, it is entirely possible, never even happened.
All these lines of questioning make for a heady viewing experience. Hüller is at the top of her game, as is to be expected, and young Machado-Graner makes a distinct impression as the traumatized son who steps in with an eleventh-hour power play that changes the course of his mother’s trial. Anatomy of a Fall stands as a cogent analysis of bias and choice in constructing our interpretations of events. It’s not just the court record, but our own memories that require delineating: how do we live with ourselves? Either as murderers or as victims of incomprehensible loss?
How do we live with the agonizing fact that we understand so little of what happens to and around us?
