You have to be pretty hard-core to turn up for a pre-noon Sunday showing of a lengthy part-foreign-language quasi-art-house movie, and to be honest I was slightly surprised to find I was not the only person in the auditorium. But, and I suppose we must take this as a hopeful sign, the up-market cinema on the roof of the capitalist necropolis in Oxford seemed to be doing pretty well, as people were turning up for Saltburn as well as Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall. Some of them even appear to have been bringing furry friends, as an employee of the cinema entered during the (extremely lengthy) prefatory proceedings to quietly ask everyone in the cinema if they had a dog with them. I had to apologise and say no. Luckily this did not turn out to be the canine equivalent of one of those Parent and Child screenings where you have to source an infant from somewhere in order to be allowed in, but as Anatomy of a Fall won the coveted Palm Dog at Cannes this year it briefly seemed like a possibility. (It also won the slightly lower-profile Palm D'Or and was in contention for the Queer Palm, and you probably have the suspicion this sentence is heading towards some sort of edgy punchline about that, which it is not.) Why he was looking for someone with a dog I regret to say I have no idea about, but let your imagination run wild.

But, honestly, the sheer length of the adverts...! It's all the fault of Christmas, or it would be if syncretic cultural events could bear moral culpability for anything. Singing carrots and super-intelligent raccoons to a jazz soundtrack and giant Venus fly-traps singing opera and it wasn't even December yet. (At least Peta don't seem to have revived their blood-curdling advert for Veganism which ran, in a fine display of irony, in front of the cannibal romance Bones and All last year. Maybe stick that on in front of the Chicken Run sequel when it gets its theatrical release, Peta, that seems like fertile ground for attracting some fresh blood to the cause. Or whatever an acceptable blood-substitute is for your typical Vegan at the end of 2023.)

A fair bit of fake blood and, as alluded to, a prominent dog feature in Anatomy of a Fall, but neither get quite as much screen time as Sandra Huller (who may be best known to English-speaking audiences for playing the daughter in Toni Erdmann a few years ago). She plays Sandra Voyter, a fairly successful writer and translator who has, relatively recently, moved with her husband and son to the husband's home village near Grenoble. As the film starts, she is trying to entertain an interviewer despite her husband blasting deafening music throughout the house in what seems like a petty attempt at sabotage; the meeting has to be abandoned. Her son (Milo Machado Graner) goes out for a walk with his dog for a few minutes – but on his return he finds his father's body sprawled on the ground beneath the third-floor balcony of the room he was working in, an ugly wound on his head.

The autopsy is inconclusive: either he hit his head on the way down, in which case it's a tragic accident (or possibly suicide), or someone bashed him on the head immediately prior to the fall, which makes it murder. But which? It is a fairly significant difference, after all. Sandra Voyter retains an old friend (Swann Arlaud) as legal representation and appears to do her best to assist the authorities. But some troubling evidence comes to light and the decision is taken to take the case to trial.

And the film is about the process leading up to the final verdict in the trial process. Some publicity for Anatomy of a Fall describes it as a 'Hitchcockian courtroom drama' – which is true about the latter part, although the legal process is the French one, but Hitchcockian? The film is more measured and thoughtful than an exercise in generating suspense. It's sort of a murder mystery, I suppose, but the main mystery is whether anyone's actually been murdered in the first place.

One of Triet's interesting choices is to keep Voyter's husband (Samuel Theis) entirely off-screen (he eventually appears in flashback) and not really show any of the period leading up to his death 'objectively'. As Sandra is the main character and not obviously a horrible person, one's sympathies naturally attach to her, and the slow accretion of evidence suggesting she my be morally compromised makes for slightly uneasy viewing. Even though the husband eventually comes across as a needy, petulant man, envious of her success, it still doesn't mean he wasn't the victim of a murder, and the film is fairly meticulous about leaving it up to the viewer to decide just what happened and who is telling the truth.

Meticulous and thorough: the proceedings delve into the events of the fatal day and the relationship between the couple in uncomfortable detail. Did they talk or argue? Did their son hear them, either way? What was the basis of the resentment that seems to have built up between them? How admissible are Voyter's quasi-autobiographical novels as evidence? It eventually verges on the mind-boggling that anyone is expected to process all of this and come up with a rational judgement they are confident enough in to use as a basis for a legal verdict.

And perhaps that's the whole point. It seems reasonable to suggest that objective facts – or, if you prefer, truth – exist, but we are forever separated from them by the imperfect mechanisms of our sense impressions and memories. All anyone can do is guess at the truth to the best of their ability, as here. In this case it may be that the writers of the film think they know for sure what actually happened, but they are certainly keeping quiet if so. In the end the verdict is certain, the truth of the case remains known only to the person or people who were there.

Using my now-acclaimed method of assessing appropriacy of film length (where we divide C, which is the film in question's length as relative to Casablanca, by G, which is the adjusted gravitas level of its main theme), we find that Anatomy of a Fall, even at over two and a half hours long, scores a fairly healthy L (length) of 0.38, well under the crisis point of 0.5. Which isn't to say I didn't sneak the odd look at my watch during it, but it's still an engrossing film with some great performances serving the story superbly. There may not be absolute closure at the end, but that's really the point – it's designed to make you think, and it achieves its aim with great success. This is an excellent film.

Awix

04.12.23 Front Page

Back Issue Page