[COLUMN] Anatomy of a Fall Is a Portrait of an Artist Under Fire | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Anatomy of a Fall begins with an interview. Author Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is being interviewed by a young postgraduate student, Zoé (Camille Rutherford). The opening round of questions concern how much of Sandra’s writing is drawn from her own life.

That discussion continues across the runtime of Anatomy of a Fall, in one form or another. Shortly after that interview, Sandra’s husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), is found dead in the snow outside their home. Samuel fell from the window at the top of their house, and there is a lingering mystery about whether Samuel threw himself from the window or whether Sandra pushed him. Anatomy of a Fall never directly answers the question, never depicts the death itself.

Sandra is accused of Samuel’s murder and placed on trial. The primary witness is the couple’s son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), who was blinded in an accident a few years earlier while under Samuel’s supervision. During the trial, Sandra’s marriage is scrutinized in forensic detail. While Anatomy of a Fall adheres to the standard template of the courtroom drama, albeit tweaked for the peculiarities of the French legal system, it often feels like a high-stakes case of literary criticism.

Anatomy of a Fall presents the lead-up to the trial akin to pre-production on a movie. As part of the investigation, the local police stage a dramatic recreation of the conversation that Sandra alleges took place before Samuel’s death, with stand-ins reading dialogue from scripts. Investigators throw a dummy from the upstairs window to examine the resulting blood splatter to gather material for the case. An earlier argument between Sandra and Samuel is described as a “dress rehearsal” for murder.

The trial itself is something of a multimedia experience. Anatomy of a Fall constantly draws the audience’s attention to the screens at the edge of the courtroom, where evidence can be presented through video or audio. When witnesses appear, such as Samuel’s therapist (Wajdi Mouawad), the mode of cross-examination more closely resembles an academic thesis defense than a traditional American or British court case. They make an argument, and that argument is interrogated.

The prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) reads excerpts from Sandra’s novels into the record, suggesting her writing could be evidence of potential criminal deeds. Literary critics appear on late night coverage of the case. The prosecution presents an audio recording of an argument between Samuel and Sandra, which Samuel made as research for his own book. Sandra argues Samuel may have forced the argument to generate material. This highly personal argument may have been staged.

Naturally, this audio recording is incomplete. Nobody in the court can see what actually happened. While the film does eventually show snippets of that argument, it cuts away before the climax. The audience listens to the sound of glass breaking, a scuffle, and the aftermath. Using that incomplete information, the audience (and the judicial panel) have to decide what those sounds mean in context. It is an act of literary interpretation as much as legal investigation.

Indeed, Samuel himself is a construct within Anatomy of a Fall. He is a presence, not an actual character. During that opening interview between Sandra and Zoé, Samuel remains working in the attic. He makes his presence known by blaring an instrumental version of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. over the speaker, but he does not appear. Once again, the film enters criticism mode, with the prosecutor later pointing out how the inherent misogyny of that track layers the sequence with subtext.

Samuel is only seen through photos and memories and heard through recordings. The characters in the film propose various interpretations of Samuel’s character and actions. Was he depressed and suicidal or was he made to feel inadequate by a more successful wife who blamed him for their son’s blindness? Samuel is not a person, but a prop. Daniel eventual exonerates his mother by telling a (probably fabricated) story in which his father seems to contemplate his own inevitable death.

At its core, Anatomy of a Fall is about how the lines between fact and fiction blur. “I really see the court as a place where our lives are fictionalized, where a story, a narrative, is put on our life,” explains director Justine Triet. However, the film is about something more profound. It is a movie about art and artists, and the challenges in interrogating an artist through their art when so much of what a person creates flows in some way from who they are.

This is a recurring preoccupation for Triet, a former documentarian. This theme of fictionalization comes up repeatedly in her work. In In Bed with Victoria, the eponymous lawyer (Virginie Efira) is a subject in her ex-husband’s (Laurent Poitrenaux) blog. In Sybil, the titular therapist (Efira again) fashions her patient’s confessions into a steamy novel. The boundaries between reality and fiction blur. Even in Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra and Samuel share first names with their actors.

This is not unusual. Writers draw from their own experiences. This extends beyond memoirs or cinema verité. “I think it’s really important for a writer to have a compost heap,” advocates fantasy author Neil Gaiman. “Everything you read, things that you write, things that you listen to, people you encounter, they can all go on the compost heap. And they will rot down. And out of them grow beautiful stories.” Sandra’s compost heap includes Daniel’s accident and Samuel’s insecurities.

In recent years, audiences seem to have become more aware of the existence of the author within the art. Part of this is an inevitable reaction against the encroaching threat of content generated by artificial intelligence, which is the very definition of art without a perspective or personality. It is impossible to watch Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City without being reminded of the gulf that exists between his own artisanal work and the dozens of computer-generated imitations.

However, there are other reasons why viewers might be more cognizant of the creator’s hand. Over the past few years, there has been a reckoning over decades of abuse within the entertainment industry, often by directors and producers who exert a heavy influence on the work that they make. That knowledge inevitably colors the resulting art. It is very difficult, for example, to separate Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris from accounts of the on-set abuse of actor Maria Schneider.

It can be difficult to separate an artist’s crime from their art, because both are fundamentally tied to the artist’s identity – their experiences, their perspective, their personality. There were reports of director Bryan Singer abusing under-age extras on the set of Apt Pupil as early as May 1997, and those allegations have only gained substance in the years since. Those crimes are monstrous by any measure, but they are also entangled within the text of the film.

Apt Pupil is the story of a teenage boy (Brad Renfro) who falls under the corrupting influence of an older man (Ian McKellen), who guides him into a world of evil. Tony Magistrale points out that Stephen King, the author who wrote the story that Singer was adapting, is fascinated by “the unsavory bonds formed between two humans, often between a younger male and an older one … that result in mutual corruption based on a shared secret.”

While that theme originated with King’s source material, it’s a pattern that recurs across Singer’s filmography. For example, X2: X-Men United features a subplot in which the older Magneto (McKellen again) similarly corrupts young Pyro (Aaron Stanford). Obviously, this sort of connection is inherently subjective. It is made within the mind of the viewer and is informed by factors outside the text itself. However, these works do not exist in a vacuum. Art don’t just conjure itself into being.

The ongoing debate over the allegations against Woody Allen is another example, one shaped by Allen’s tendency to (literally and metaphorically) cast himself in his own work. The resurfaced allegations prompted cultural critics to pour over Allen’s filmography and even his private notes in the hopes of finding some answer about the man himself. It was, in the style of Anatomy of a Fall, literary criticism as a public trial. It was spurred by the #metoo movement.

Allen poured so much of himself into his work that it functioned a prism through which he might be viewed. “It’s as if, like the picture of Dorian Grey, Allen’s films served as his conscience, leaving him free to misbehave in three dimensions,” wrote Phoebe Hoban in New York Magazine in the early 1990s. “All those elbow-nudging jokes about child molestation (the subject pops up in at least four of his films) and the permutations of sex with 16-year-old twins don’t seem quite so funny anymore.”

France has a complication relationship the #metoo movement that prompted this introspection. The country regards the movement with some skepticism, wary of American puritanism or censorship impeding artistic expression. While Triet has voiced broad support as “a spectator” of what the movement means for her daughter’s generation, she has also discussed distancing her work from the idea of feminism and insisted she “didn’t wait” for #metoo to balance her own work and home lives.

In recent years, France has embraced controversial Americans like Woody Allen, Louis C.K., and Johnny Depp. Three years ago, Roman Polanski won the César, despite public protests and a walkout from many actors in attendance. In many cases, those involved advocate for a separation between the artist as a person and their work as an object. In 2019, Cannes chief Thierry Fremaux insisted that the festival wasn’t awarding controversial French actor Alain Delon “the Nobel Peace Prize. [They were] giving him a Palme d’Or for his career as an actor.” Artist and art could be compartmentalized.

This is a complicated and thorny debate. It is also at the heart of Anatomy of a Fall. Triet is aware of this. “Tomorrow you could take my film and look at it and decide that I’m obsessed with killing men and use it against me,” she has joked in press coverage. As it stands, Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and stands a decent chance of a Best Picture nomination. It’s not hard to understand the film’s appeal, particularly in this cultural context.

Anatomy of a Fall is a movie that places an artist on trial, wondering whether art can be evidence.