Ten years have passed since the French filmmaker Justine Triet prevailed with the magnificent The Battle of Solférino (2013), an unforgettable film of thrilling emotions (available on Filmin) that intertwined the intimate with the political, throughout the electoral day of the May 6, 2012, when a reporter (Laetitia Dosch), who is to cover the presidential elections in which Hollande defeated Sarkozy, is harassed by her ex-husband (Vincent Macaigne), who wants to see their children. It is impossible not to compare it with this Anatomy of a Fall (released on December 6), Triet’s fourth feature, in which the great Sandra Hüller (the revelation of Toni Erdmann) is accused of the death of her husband, whether she physically pushed from the balcony of the Alpine chalet where they lived isolated from the world, as if (always from a fiscal point of view) it had undermined his confidence to the point of pushing him, no longer physically, to jump. In both films we have a broken couple, with strong women facing weakened men. Although, of course, in these ten years, the world has changed.
Triet admits that “it’s something I thought about when I sat down to write, since both films talk about the end of a couple. MeToo has obviously been involved: Macaigne’s character is much more powerful and combative than that of Samuel Theis in Anatomy of a Fall, while Sandra Hüller feels much more self-confident and self-conscious when it comes to her vital choices that Laetitia in Solférino. It is something that Hüller brought with her, she was very sure that her character was right, that she did not have to excuse herself, or be judged, for the way she lived or for having a dominant position in the couple.
Triet wrote the film in four hands with his partner, the filmmaker Arthur Harari (we highly recommend his Diamant noir or Onoda, 10,000 nights in the jungle), and “he always reproached myself for not being sufficiently interested in the male character. It’s funny because we have very different visions of the meaning of the film.”
Anatomy of a Fall examines what happens when “a man feels diminished by his wife. I find it exciting to ask questions about what happens when a woman occupies the traditional place of a man, because she can also be a monster.” Or not, the film moves around that question point, which passes through the image that Hüller projects in the courtroom: “During editing, there were debates around me all the time about whether she seemed vulnerable enough, whether you could empathize with her or not, whether she seemed too guilty or not guilty enough…” The scenes that are evoked during the trial, of high dramatic intensity, inevitably refer to Secrets of a Marriage, both the series and the film. “Bergman managed to reverse the power relations between men and women, which I think was very innovative for the time.”
There is the case of the woman judged for being strong, and the man who, in one way or another, succumbs to his own weakness. And to this is added that, as is also the case behind the cameras, they are both writers: “Bergman also said that, in cinema, we all borrow things from others. Writers are like vampires, and in this case it is important, because, beyond having a son who unites them, they are creators with the same ambitions. In life, people who no longer love each other often don’t even talk to each other, but they continue debating… I find the family a fascinating topic, because it has to be constantly reinvented. I think it comes from my own upbringing. My father had three wives successively. My mother raised the children of the previous mother, who was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. They belonged to a Buddhist commune, and we were often there. Let’s say that my family scheme was not typical. It doesn’t seem to me that there is anything entirely natural about being in a relationship. With Arthur, we have children. But we are rarely at home, because of filming. There’s all that, and then there’s the issue of falling, which has always obsessed me. When I saw, for example, the credits of the series Mad Men, with that endless free fall, which I believe was also the subject of a complaint by victims of 9/11, I was amazed.” In this case, it is the fall of patriarchy. “Or virility, with Arthur we didn’t theorize much about it either, but it is the underlying idea.”
There is therefore a whole laboratory of ideas in a sophisticated and exciting device that can be compared, without problems, to judicial classics such as Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959) or The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), as well as true recent crimes style The Staircase. A wonderful Palme d’Or, that award that, because it is by far the most precious in the world of cinema, always raises suspicions, especially when it is won by a woman, as happened with Titane (2021), by Julia Ducournau. But the truth is that, with few exceptions, only one person can win it, and Triet is as good a winner as Moretti or Kaurismaki.
