Anatomy of a Fall is another awards season contender that recently won two Golden Globe awards, including Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film. It’s been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Actress, Original Screenplay, and Film Editing.
At its Cannes Film Festival premiere, the movie won the Palme d’Or and the Palme Dog Award.
The movie switches back and forth between English and French, but that’s far from being a bad thing as it remains a riveting mystery, a challenging meditation on objective and subjective truths, and a story that engages us about the nature of holding a family together in their darkest hour.
The movie stars German actress Sandra Huller as Sandra Voyter, a novelist living in an isolated house in Grenoble with her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their visually impaired but precocious son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner).
The family’s fortune takes a turn for the worse when Samuel is found dead by Daniel after he plummeted out of their attic. Sandra believes Samuel fell and was not murdered, but her lawyer friend (Swann Arlaud, looking like a younger Martin Short) tells her that the court will not buy that.
When the trial takes place, a lot of dark secrets are brought to light, such as potential domestic violence between the two. One secret that gets shared during the trial is when Sandra confesses that Samuel attempted suicide by overdosing on medication.
The plot thickens when Daniel takes the stand, but he gives a different perspective about where he was standing when he sensed his father’s body. Young Machado Graner proves to be the emotional core that lends this movie the right amount of gravity it requires.
The trial is spoken mostly in French despite Sandra’s objections. Even with subtitles dominating the screen, the dialogue is smart and invites us to become involved at every turn. The trial itself is like an onion: It gives us more and more layers that never become convoluted but are integral to the story.
The developments in the plot have such a dramatic heft, and the characters are clearly defined by their obsessions, whether good or bad. The drama is highly affecting for each of the characters, and because it’s directed, written, and acted with such emotional vigor, it gets the job done in spades.
Anatomy of a Fall was directed and co-written by Justine Triet, and she crafts a film that is thoroughly absorbing. For a foreign language film, the language is secondary to the language of the characters.
These are characters with real personal problems, and the trial is laid out in such a way that it demands our attention.
Will Sandra be acquitted of her alleged crime? The movie may give an answer. Then again, it may not. None of the characters are totally sure how this case will end, and by wonderful design, neither are we.
Grade: A
(Rated R for some language, sexual references and violent images.)
