This review contains spoilers.
“You need to start seeing yourself the way others are going to perceive you.” This straightforward statement from a lawyer to his client is the key question that Anatomy of a Fall, the new courtroom drama from French director Justine Triet, wants to explore about the contemporary legal system and the boundary between truth, reality, and fiction.
In its long history, courtroom dramas have established the tradition of exploring the truth. Whether it is examining the evidence or debating with the jury members, truth is always at the heart of this genre. However, Anatomy of a Fall, inspired by Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, questions such tradition in a situation where truth is absent.
Anatomy of a Fall follows the trial of a successful writer Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) after her husband Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) was found dead from a fall. Samuel’s sudden death invades the life of Sandra and the couple’s son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). As Samuel’s wife and the only other person in the house, Sandra is under suspicion and subsequently indicted.
Sandra is a novelist. She believes in the power of fiction, which seems to be the opposite of the law. At least, the law is supposed to discover the truth. Ironically, what is presented in Anatomy of a Fall’s courtroom is not the truth but fictional narratives that try to convince the jury. Everyone who attends the trial has their own narrative to account for what happened: the son, the prosecutor, the doctors, the policeman, the lawyer, the media, the audiences, and Sandra. As the trial progresses, viewers can find themselves constantly changing one’s position while new narratives keep challenging previous ones.
Unlike most courtroom dramas, Anatomy of a Fall never tells us what happened. Instead, it depicts something common in reality yet ignored by the genre: the truth is not always knowable. In doing so, Triet successfully turns the courtroom into an arena for reality and fiction. When the prosecutor reads out Sandra’s novel and claims that it reflects her motivation for the murder, the boundary between truth and fiction finally collapses. This seemingly outrageous act points to the ridiculousness of the legal system as an institution. In such a system, jury members, who are just regular citizens, can have the biggest impact on people’s reality. Their judgements can be made based on evidence, and testimony. They can also be easily affected by common sense, moral standards, or their perception of the defendant. That’s what makes Sandra’s lawyer friend Vincent (Swann Arlaud) say the quote at the beginning of this review.
Another one of Triet’s triumphs is the beautiful complexities of the central character and her marriage. Boosted by Sandra Hüller’s powerhouse performance, Sandra Voyter is a woman of many faces. She is unapologetic, smart, ambitious, tough, caring, honest, sincere, and more dominant in her marriage. The husband is the one who spends time homeschooling their son while she has more time to write. Sandra has control of her marriage until the trial brings her and her marriage under the spotlight of a patriarchal society. She has to face judgments just because she is bi-sexual, a mother, a wife, a foreigner, and more importantly, a successful woman. Maybe she is not a perfect victim, a positive figure, or a good wife, but can our society punish her just because of who she is and what she desires? Sadly, her complexity is something that is missing from mainstream English-speaking feminist films.
At the beginning of the film, Daniel wants to understand, yet he soon realises that he will never be able to understand the truth. So in the end, after Marge Berger (Jehnny Beth) tells Daniel “All we can do is decide.”, Daniel makes his decision to trust Sandra. At that moment, the truth does not matter anymore. Maybe it never mattered. What matters is the decision to believe in a fiction that will help rebuild his reality.
“Courtroom One Gavel” by Joe Gratz is marked with CC0 1.0.