Last May at the Cannes Film Festival, when receiving the Palme d’Or for the remarkable Anatomy of a Fall, which opens this Friday in Quebec, French filmmaker Justine Triet took advantage of her platform to shoot bullets red on the Macron government, in front of 3 million viewers.
“The commodification of culture that the neoliberal government defends is destroying the French cultural exception, this same cultural exception without which I would not be here today,” declared the 45-year-old filmmaker while accepting her prize.
The response from the Macron government was immediate. French Culture Minister Rima Abdul-Malak called Justine Triet’s “far-left” speech “ungrateful and unfair.” Upset, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne still refused at the end of September, when more than 1 million French people had already seen the film, to discover Anatomy of a Fall, believing that its director had to “reconsider her relationship to reality”.
And too bad for only the third woman in the 76-year history of the Cannes Film Festival to win a Palme d’Or…
“I think it would have been interesting to go see the film to really see my “relationship to reality”, to use the words of Élisabeth Borne,” Justine Triet explains to me in an interview. I think these are people who, in my opinion, are not very interested in what I was actually talking about in my speech. »
Justine Triet’s first films, unique short films, were shot with three pieces of string. In Cannes, the author-filmmaker dedicated her Palme d’Or to all the young directors who are unable to film. “I was able to find my place 15 years ago in a world that was a little less hostile, where it was still possible to make mistakes and start again,” said the painting graduate from the Paris School of Fine Arts. .
Failing to please the French government, Anatomy of a Fall, a brilliant legal drama, became a popular and critical success in France in addition to receiving a warm welcome abroad. In the United States, some predict the film will appear at the Oscars, even if it was not selected by France to compete for the Oscar for best international film, a committee having preferred the more academic The Passion of Dodin Bouffant by Tran Anh Hung.
Anatomy of a Fall tells the story of Sandra (terrific Sandra Hüller), a writer accused of the murder of her lover Samuel (Samuel Theis), found dead in front of their house in the high mountains by Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), their visually impaired son 11 years old.
Is this a homicide or a suicide? Did Samuel escape the window or was he pushed to his death? Sandra proclaims her innocence, but even her lawyer, an old friend, seems to harbor doubts and her own son, who attends the trial, ends up no longer knowing how to separate fact from fiction.
Justine Triet had already set part of the story of her second feature film, Victoria (with Virginie Efira, in a more comic register), in court. “I find it interesting as a framework, to finally track down not necessarily the details of the whodunnit – or whether she did it or not –, but more to observe the fairly everyday things of the couple, which would perhaps be more banal or more painful to watch if it was not within a trial. »
We quickly understand that this Anatomy of a Fall, a double-meaning title, is also the autopsy of a couple. Samuel, a French writer who is champing at the bit, takes care of his son on a daily basis while his partner, of German origin, enjoys international success. He feels unbalanced while she seems imperturbable. He seems envious of her success and the time she allows herself to write; she is angry with him for forcing their family to settle in the Alps of her childhood and to live in his language.
Justine Triet, who co-wrote Anatomy of a Fall with her lover Arthur Harari (who also co-wrote her previous film, Sybil), has explored the tensions within the couple since her first feature film, the excellent The Battle of Solferino, in which his companion played a supporting role. Arthur Harari, filmmaker to whom we owe Black Diamond (with Niels Schneider), plays the famous lawyer Georges Kiejman in The Goldman Trial by Cédric Khan, the opening film of the 29th Cinémania festival.
Justine Triet wanted not only to tell the story of a couple falling apart, but also to do so without avoiding mediocrity, she explains. “That is to say, I think we really had to go to places that weren’t necessarily very beautiful or very chic. We really had to delve into something quite ugly and quite shameful. »
A pivotal scene in the film, a flashback to an extremely tense argument, required around fifty versions, admits the filmmaker. “For the longest time, I wasn’t happy with the result. I said to myself: “But it’s a failure! The film is going to be a failure because I don’t like these characters.” And at a certain point, we found a way to enter the scene, with Arthur, with this idea of time stolen from the other. Afterwards, we said to ourselves that in an argument there is always one of the two who wants to argue more than the other. »
This very strong scene about the concessions and compromises of life as a couple – they speak English, which is neither of them’s mother tongue – turns into an escalation of reproaches. Anything but Manichean, subtle and brilliant, this confrontation (which recalls the cinema of John Cassavetes) allows us both to better understand the resentment of Samuel and Sandra, and to side with their arguments in turn.
“I still give the last word to Sandra,” explains Justine Triet, “but it’s true that we tried to be fair and agree with everyone. »
Anatomy of a Fall, which draws its story more from doubt than from certainties, poses more questions than it offers answers. What did Daniel (terrific Milo Machado Graner) see and hear? In a scene of unforgettable formal originality, the son testifies in court about a discussion he had with his father before drawing conclusions from it. Is he right, is he wrong?
“Children, in a way, never know who their parents are,” believes Justine Triet. I think that this idea underlies the whole film: that our parents escape us and that we ourselves have to reconstruct the story to really understand who they are. That Daniel was blind came from the idea of putting him in the same position as us. That is to say, we missed something and he also missed something. And we will have to make do with these shortcomings. »
In order to fill the void and read between the lines of this magnificently enigmatic film.
