What kind of person secretly records their fights as a couple? One that wants to prove something to someone (a judge perhaps) or one that seeks to take advantage of them in the form of a novel. The question floats in the head of everyone who leaves the cinema to see Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet’s film that triumphed at the Golden Globes, has at the center of its meticulous script a chilling marital battle scene. In five minutes that are difficult to forget, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a successful writer, and Samuel (Samuel Theis), a much less successful teacher and writer, reproach each other for everything and bring to light the deepest conflicts of their relationship, everything that has been poisoning them for years.
Placed in the position of a member of a popular jury, the viewer is left to decide if this bitter (and potentially deadly?) discussion represents the dynamics of that marriage in the most authentic way, or if it is just an outburst that does not reflect reality. of their life neither more nor less than their scenes of domestic placidity in that mountain chalet where they live. Beyond real life – where Theis has just been accused of rape on a set – one thing is clear, only two people who know each other and owe each other a lot are capable of hurting each other in such a precise way.
That of Anatomy of a Fall is perhaps the most memorable but not the only marital fight that leaves the cinema this year. In Maestro, the biopic of Leonard Bernstein directed by Bradley Cooper that can be seen on Netflix, the tension between the composer and his wife, Felicia Montalegre (Carey Mulligan) is expressed throughout the film more in the form of silences, tight lips and nervous gestures, but there is also a crucial scene in the second half of the film, which could earn Mulligan a nomination, in which this couple, so functional within their rarity, says to each other – she shouts, he whispers – some things when in In reality it would mean others. As the giant Snoopy-shaped balloon from the Thanksgiving Day parade passes through the windows of his very expensive apartment, a testament to his success, she blames him for wasting his gift, for not understanding the difference between geniuses. and mere mortals. Montalegre/Mulligan does not need to mention by name Tommy, the young musician who at that moment accompanies Bernstein everywhere, but he does say to her husband: “If you continue like this, you will end up like an old queen.”
Sandra Hüller, who has had a stellar year, not only fights with her partner in Anatomy of a Fall, but also in The Zone of Interest, in which she plays Hedwig Höss, the wife of Nazi Rudolf Höss, responsible for turning Auschwitz into a perfect killing machine. There, the couple’s discussion, so banal – he is going to be transferred to Germany, she doesn’t want to – serves to highlight the monstrosity of what surrounds them. “This is the life we ??always dreamed of,” says Hedwig, while through the windows you can see the air fouled by the crematoriums. The film premieres on January 19.
A well-written fight scene serves to expose all the corpses that the couple has been hiding under the rug for years and also to establish their power dynamics. This is evident in May December, the film by Todd Haynes that will hit Spanish cinemas in February and that is partially inspired by the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher who in the nineties was tried and convicted for having sexual relations with her student. Vili Fualaau, 12 years old, whom she ended up marrying and having two daughters. Julianne Moore, in a role with a story similar to Letourneau’s, has 70% of the speaking time in her discussion with her partner, played by actor Charles Melton.
In this entire range of Oscar-winning films, dramas – although May December was classified as a comedy at the Golden Globes, in part to ensure more nominations – far from the franchises that have dominated the box office in the last decade and that are beginning to show signs of exhaustion, there is one that stands out by its absence. Celine Song’s Past Lives does not contain a single scene of marital quarrel. The fracture that the protagonist experiences between the reality of her peaceful marriage and the possibility of a love from the past that did not materialize is not resolved with shouts but rather through silences and low-tension dialogues.
Quite the opposite happens in Passages, by Ira Sachs. The triangle formed by the characters of Ben Wishaw, Franz Rogowski and Adèle Exarchopoulos caused people to talk about their sex scenes – on social networks, a large part of the youngest film consumers are very critical of sequences that they almost always consider unnecessary – , but the verbal right blows that the three members of that fragile structure give each other have as much or more weight.
In 2019, a scene from Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story ended up becoming meme fodder. An actress, Nicole Barber (Scarlett Johansson), visits her soon-to-be ex-husband (Adam Driver) in the apartment he rents so she can visit their son. “You’re acting like your father,” she says. “You’re just like your mother,” he replies, “when we were in bed together, sometimes I looked at you, I saw her, and it disgusted me.” From there, and in four minutes, mutual accusations follow one another, his infidelity comes to light (there could have been many more, he admits, she should thank him for all the women he didn’t sleep with when He was in his early twenties and was the darling of the New York theater) until he, after hitting the wall and breaking it, tells her that sometimes he wishes her death. The most voted comment on YouTube, where the scene has more than 6.5 million views, reads like this: “If you think this is exaggerated or unrealistic, I congratulate you.” In a video that Baumbach recorded analyzing the scene step by step, he explains the importance of staging and choreography of movements – the small brick of juice that she drinks and places on the floor represents their son, Henry, absent and helpless. – and the decision to edit it with a series of increasingly tight shots, inspired by another verbal fight scene, not a couple, in The Last Movie, by Peter Bogdanovich. “I wanted to convey the idea that endings are not failures,” says the director. While promoting the film, Baumbach could not escape speculation that the script could be based on the breakdown of his own marriage to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Justine Triet has said in several interviews that she had that scene from Marriage Story (along with others from the canon of marital acrimony, such as Kramer against Kramer) as a starting point for hers in Anatomy of a Fall, but more with a desire to correct it rather than emulate it. “I love the movie. I find her role much more fragile than his. The fight scene in my film is done almost in dialogue with that scene. I thought: I’ll give this woman some things to answer with,” she explained in an interview with Picture House magazine. In the French edition of Slate, she was more specific: “I love Adam Driver’s character, but I find the scene problematic because I don’t understand how this woman responds the way she responds, that is, without having any response.”
Your Sandra does have them. Among other things, she tells her husband that she does not believe in the modern idea of ??equal marriage, which consists of dividing care time like someone who distributes dividends, and she reproaches him that if he does not finish his novels, perhaps it is due to lack of talent and not so much because she has dedicated herself to raising her son and finishing that damned house to which she never asked to move. This is what turns scenes of marital poison into first-class dramatic material: what two people who share a roof, past, assets and family can say to each other is (almost) always within the realm of belief.
