Full box for Anatomy of a fall. After its victory at Cannes, where it won the prestigious Palme d’Or, Justine Triet’s film is unanimous with critics. A man and a woman, both writers, one failed and the other recognized; arguments, a fatal fall – and their visually impaired child in the middle. Suicide or homicide, justice will have to decide. For two and a half hours, married life is played out again, with its grudges and grudges, while that of Sandra Voyter, widow and accused personified by Sandra Hüller, is shattered.
“The shadow of a doubt remains”, writes Étienne Sorin in the columns of Figaro, which speaks of “the best French trial film since L’Hermine, by Christian Vincent”. The critic salutes the interpretation of the main actress, who discovers at the helm a powerful woman “whose husband we learn was a teacher and depressed. This reversal of roles, not to say deconstruction, is not innocent. It may seem theoretical, on the contrary it is wonderfully embodied,” says Sorin.
Les Échos, for its part, analyzes the “strength of the dialogue” which opposes the protagonists in the courtroom. “The fight is uneven. Sandra is indeed weakened since she does not master French and the film offers a remarkable study on language: the power of those who know how to use it, the vulnerability of others. And to add that the palme d’or 2023 “opens the return to cinema in style by first recounting the tragedy of a dead love”.
In 2016, in her film Victoria, the director had already filmed a lawyer; here she immerses herself in the workings of justice, at the very heart of its decision-making, in the form of a quasi-permanent judicial camera. The choice of director also convinces L’Obs. Nicolas Schaller emphasizes the relevance of the format and the staging which make the couple’s child appear as the key element of this drama, “he who has the sound, the meaning(s) but not the image. This famous missing image which makes the truth impossible and transforms the trial into a fiction factory. Justine Triet “reaches a deeper degree of intensity, nourishing the warmth of existence with the coldness of the investigation”, adds Liberation. Laura Tuillier indicates that the high point of the film “is not the truth, the real as it presents itself to us every day in its indescribable chaos, but indeed the manifestation of the truth, according to this way that it is up to men to imprint a meaning, in particular through language, on what exists, on what happens.
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Justine Triet “shatters the filmic codes of the trial film (fixed shots, symmetrical lines, etc.) through a game of zooms, low-angle shots and permanent but fully controlled camera movements, marrying the gaze of this wandering child to escape the intensity of the exchanges”, observes Thierry Chèze for Première. “And this staging is above all at the service of a masterful scenario,” he concludes. “She examines with finesse the gray areas and the speech of each character. Well-crafted, Anatomy of a Fall is nevertheless more like a good detective TV movie than a great trial film,” explains Olivier Ubertalli du Point.
“I wanted to take the pretext of the trial film to really talk about the couple, with the idea of putting a child at the center, as a main witness”, confided the director to La Voix du Nord . A successful bet – all that’s missing is the approval of the public, who will be able to judge for themselves from Wednesday 23 August.
