Anatomy of a Fall

Triet’s films are obsessed with obfuscation. From the incredibly convoluted The Age of Panic (2013), her narrative feature debut on the lives of a family backdropped by the 2012 French election, to Sibyl (2019), a psycho-sexual thriller on the wanton acts of a psychiatrist and her patient, Triet never quite plays a story straight. This may seem odd given her previous career as a documentary filmmaker, but of course it does — to quote Triet herself: “the more fiction I direct, the more I like the ‘trickery’”. To her, fiction acts as a medium in which fact is indeterminate, where much like real life, known variables of reality are blurred to question the audience in their abject belief in the truth. Though this is not something she has achieved particularly successfully in the past, it’s an admirable goal to have in film. Thus, I find the rapid, deleterious success she has received with her latest work, Anatomy of a Fall (2023), all the more troubling. Rather than blur the line between the honesty and the lies of its characters, this film practically deletes truth from existence, creating a falsehood that pretends to live in the very real world. 

For those unaware of the film’s existence in the cultural stratosphere, Triet’s newest film explores the complications that arise from the death of one Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) and the alleged involvement of his spouse, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller). Though there is little evidence surrounding the suspicious death, homicide cannot be ruled out. What ensues is a gruelling battle between truth and fiction, as the battered and bruised history of a relationship is splayed front and centre for all to see. 

Although she prides herself in her deliberate confusion of “fake and stolen ‘reality’”, even mentioning in the Cannes press release that she wanted the film to “follow the couple around like a predator [...as] an examination of marriage”, it is on every level a fundamental failure. This disappoints especially when she’s shown competency in producing very tense and affecting scenes, which are not sparse in either of her former attempts. Anatomy of a Fall however, only knows how to deflate tension by pointing at the obvious. There’s a very obvious rhythmic motif in the score whose recursive presence in the film does anything but obfuscate. It screams that Triet, in her complete unawareness of the viewer’s intelligence, requires us to connect the dots with crayon marks scrawled all over the page. 

This is already fairly tame criticism, given that plenty of films do already use heavily foreshadowed motivic pieces to point to a grander apotheosis in the film. What sets Anatomy apart, however, is its complete lack of self-awareness on its very shaky circumscription of its hypothesis. There’s an entirely superficial quality to the film that Triet is almost obliviously highlighting in her perceived clever one-two punches of her script. So much of the circuitous editing emphasises, cuts and redistributes the fat across the entire film, producing a melodrama that lacks the pretense of knowing that it’s melodramatic. It’s almost laughable how obvious Triet makes Sandra’s profession as a writer bleed straight into the discussions of fictions and falsehoods, as if the mere presence of such discourse in the film relinquishes the complete odious quality of the film itself. Languishing in the brooding quarters of its own self-pity, Triet fills the film with a lot of backlogged nonsense that is used to justify the film’s semiotic attempts at trying something new by introducing the talking point within the film, nullifying and quashing all critiques of the dangerously literal by blending them with the metaphorical. 

The immediate negative reaction I had towards Anatomy is not due to its subject matter but its representation of such matters. In a climate for movies where screenwriters are increasingly antagonistic to the perception of narrative demanded by audiences, Triet feeds into that insipid, hollow demand: she baits but never bites in her critiques. In fact, the statements she made about Macron’s government and their utter failure in upholding the French arts during her Palme D’Or acceptance speech feels more truthful than anything in this film. 

It is why I say she does not blur the line as much as she just removes it in the beginning; in Anatomy, she succumbs to her deepest impulses in simply imitating life. But by simply mimicking life in all its foibles and indignities, she does nothing with it. She has created a documentary that is entirely fiction. By relying entirely on cliches to present a judicious case that she has no familiarity with, simply playing on nebulous ideas as one toying with the idea of fictions nested in reality would, she lacks the nuance to speak the truth about any formalist choices she has made. Sure, it’s occasionally well-presented, though the few moments where she doesn’t have a pulse on the film are oddly some of the better scenes. By accidentally letting the actors breathe and deliver their scenes with a cadence that isn’t deliberately tempestuous for tension’s sake, a fibre of authenticity can be observed. 

Of course general audiences love Anatomy; beneath its hollow-eyed images, it’s a boiler-plate courtroom drama with a few ravishing monologues that satiate the desire for argumentative fiction. To imply that one is basic for loving Anatomy is ridiculous; plenty of people I admire and respect do love it for their own reasons. However, it’s not tautological to say that basic people love Anatomy. Ultimately, appraisal for emptiness breeds a vacuum of meaningless art, and I sincerely hope Triet will askew the melodrama rips she’s biting into and aim back to her lofty but admirable goal of playing with reality. 

3/10