This year’s Cannes has been much better, in terms of quality cinema, than last year’s more subdued edition.
A few hours ago Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” screened at the Lumiere and it’s truly one of the best films of the fest. Either this year’s jury gives Sandra Hüller the Best Actress prize or they’ll skip it in favor of the Palme d’Or.
Hüller plays Sandra, a German-born, France-based novelist who gets accused of killing her husband. It doesn’t help that one of her novels eerily predicted some exact details of the crime.
Set in the wintry morning French Alps, Samuel (Samuel Theis) is found dead on the ground outside his house. The cause is a major gash on his bloodied head. The police cannot identify whether the head trauma occurred before or after a three-story window fall and whether somebody pushed him or not.
Sandra was the only other person in the house, and the night prior the couple had a verbal fight that turned physical. Sandra’s blind 10-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), heard it all. There’s even a recording of it.
Coincidences and clues start to pile up, but there’s still an uncertainty that invades this film. The viewer never really knows who to trust. Is Sandra a murderer? We don’t want her to be, but the possibility always seems to linger through the frames.
Triet, who co-wrote the script with Arthur Harrari, adds discovery after discovery, all casting doubt upon one another, just as Sandra’s own child begins to suspect her. As much as this film’s grim courtroom scenes fascinate, ‘Anatomy’ is also about a family destroying Itself.
At its best, this is about the unknowable, the frustrating aspect of life’s unanswered questions. Triet tackles the intimate stories that we tell, the truths, and falsehoods, that slip through the cracks. The ambiguity is here damn-near perverse. Triet doesn’t side with Sandra, she just lets us watch her actions.