Blaise Radley
The Art of Leading a Witness in Anatomy of a Fall
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What is a courtroom if not a staging ground for storytelling? Every aspect of a trial, be it criminal or corporate, hinges on two opposing sides laying claim to a particular version of events, each new witness and piece of evidence placed in a neat order to lead their audience, the jury, to a set conclusion. In the end, the victor will be the side that spins the most convincing yarn, regardless of any overriding “truth” of the matter. But what pushes a juror to ignore the ambiguities such duelling perspectives leave behind and choose one narrative over another? In French director Justine Triet’s latest film, the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall (2023), it’s not only the lawyers that are leading the witness but the formalised aspects of filmmaking craft.
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From a genre perspective, Anatomy of a Fall has all the makings of a classic whodunnit, albeit one tempered by the icy realism of modern true crime docudramas. German novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) stands accused of murdering her French husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), who, depending on whose story you believe, either fell from the top window of their chalet or was given a shove off of the balcony. To complicate matters, Samuel’s corpse was discovered on the driveway by the couple’s partially blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) as he returned from walking their dog Snoop, his visual impairment, the result of an earlier accident for which it’s readily apparent Sandra never forgave Samuel. So far, so Hitchcock.
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Much like the Master of Suspense, Triet recognises cinema’s allure as a vessel for voyeurism, closely following the perspectives of each witness as they provide their proposed version of events. But it’s Daniel to whom Triet clings most closely, pitching him between the prosecution’s tales of a tempestuous marriage in decay and the heavy question marks the defence holds over his father’s supposed suicidal tendencies. In his childish naïveté and visual impairment Triet finds an effective, if rather blunt, analogue for the restricted view of the audience, limited as we are to the information she chooses to present us with. By picking through the various storytelling details that define a relationship—a montage of glossy photos of the couple at varying life stages during the opening credits, or directly visualising Daniel’s imaginings about what happened between his parents on the day of his father’s death—Triet constructs several different narrative realities in the process, forcing her audience to fill in the gaps left between each frame in unison with Daniel. In doing so, she raises key questions about whether it’s possible to reconcile the competing unreliable narrators of a courtroom and how the outcome of a fork in fate often rests on someone making an intentional decision to believe.
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Triet certainly isn’t shy about laying out her preoccupations with the ambiguities found between truthful testimony and storytelling, opening on a cosy interview in the chalet between Sandra and a graduate student, Zoé (Camille Rutherford). The initial line of inquiry is suitably provocative, Zoé asking frankly about how Sandra cribs elements from her own life, particularly her son’s accident when writing her novels. “It’s troubling to the reader because we know it’s your life. Do you think one can only write from experience?” Sandra’s response is slippery—characteristically so as we’ll later see—acknowledging that, while the truth has always served as an inspiration for her fiction, the imagined characters that appear in her writing bear little relation to the reality of those who inspired them. Touting the essential unknowability of another being and the artifice storytelling requires at both a textual and interpersonal level, Sandra puts it simply, “You’re in the book. And yet I don’t know you.” From the outset, lines are drawn between how a person is perceived and how that person truly is, if such a truth even exists.
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When Zoé pushes Sandra more firmly on the obvious parallels between her work and her life, Sandra swerves away in a coquettish manner, instead asking Zoé about her own interests, pursuits, and passions, even cutting Zoé off directly when she tries to bring the conversation back around to storytelling. Whether or not such flirtatious behaviour is part of Sandra’s publicly constructed self as an author or the result of a direct attraction is left unclear. Less ambiguous, however, is the interruption from Sandra’s previously unseen husband, whose presence is announced by a floor-shudderingly loud steel band cover of ‘P.I.M.P.’ by 50 Cent, politely ignored at first, but played on a loop till Zoé is forced to leave. Coupled with Sandra’s comments about her longing for intellectual repartee and her isolation in the French Alps speak to, at the very least, an unhappy marriage, Triet lingers long on the minor (but no less visible) frustrations that Hüller plays across her face. By the time we actually see her husband in the flesh, he’s already dead, his scarlet red blood soaking through the white sheets of snow outside. Even the most amateur of sleuths wouldn’t have a hard time picking between the breadcrumbs Triet is laying down.
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If Triet’s opening snapshot of domestic strife is easily read as a storytelling construct intended to lead viewers toward certain conclusions, the ensuing scene of Samuel’s autopsy should theoretically serve as a counterbalance. Here, after all, lies the domain of science and fact. But during the autopsy, the photography adopts an intimate perspective rather than a distanced and clinical one, DP Simon Beaufils employing a roving handheld camera that seems to leer at Samuel’s mottled blue skin and cavernous head wound rather than merely observing the details. As the coroner explains how the impact that killed Samuel couldn’t have come from the fall, painting the motive in amusingly ambiguous terms (“Forensic cause: accidental and/or deliberate”), the camera continues to push in on Samuel’s face, intrusive in its single-mindedness. The facts remain inconclusive, but Triet’s exaggerated use of perspective camerawork mirrors the audience’s focus on the missing puzzle pieces rather than the person laid out on the slab. As we’ve only known Samuel posthumously, his initial narrative function is as an embodied clue rather than a character we’re invested in emotionally; merely a means to steer the story toward one side of the coroner’s “and/or” equation.
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In the lead-up to the trial we see numerous different lines of investigation unfold, each of them building toward a different prospective account of what happened. First, there’s Vincent (Swann Arlaud), Sandra’s old lawyer friend, who immediately asks the questions the audience has no doubt been stewing over. Was Samuel a known risk taker? Had he ever been diagnosed with depression? Did he ever lean out of the window to talk to her or Daniel? Had there ever been a fight before over the excessively loud music? Already, between these lines, a narrative begins to take shape—a man quite literally on the edge, who had almost overdosed on painkillers only a few months before (not mentioned by Sandra initially, but conveniently remembered as the trial draws closer). Simultaneously, the police are attempting to construct their own version of events, restaging a discussion Daniel claims to have heard between his parents before he left to walk their dog in an attempt to prove that any such conversation would have to have been a shouting match to be heard above the pumping steel drums. Regardless, the audience doesn’t need to be told why it’s so important to prove that Sandra and Samuel had been screaming at one another only minutes before the latter’s death.
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Perhaps the most revealing of these scenes is one in which Sandra rehearses her testimony, sitting in front of Vincent and a home camcorder. But while the camera sitting on a tripod within the frame remains static, by contrast Triet’s does not, zooming in slowly as Sandra stumbles slightly through her account, encroaching ever further on her personal space in a fashion that encourages the audience to probe for potential tells and inconsistencies. As editor Laurent Sénéchal cuts back and forth between Vincent and Sandra, we land on a high angle extreme close-up that blocks out everything but Sandra’s mouth. In theory, it’s the words coming out that should matter, and yet what’s emphasised here is the artificiality of it all, each adjustment by Vincent honing the story Sandra is reciting, just as each conspicuous camera movement brings the motives behind Sandra’s testimonial into question. Not one to miss a chance to sew further seeds of doubt, Triet further makes it evident that Sandra is discomforted by the way she has to police her words, regardless of her guilt or innocence—the artifice isn’t of her own design, after all, but part of the construction of the courtroom and, inevitably, of cinema.
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It’s one year later during the trial itself, however, where any semblance of objective truth truly crumbles. It’s telling that the time jump is accompanied by a shot of Daniel playing a rather dramatic number on the piano, aligning the viewer’s perspective more firmly with his. During the trial, Triet assembles a cavalcade of witnesses with varying biases and perspectives, but it’s the two central storytellers who cast the largest shadows over proceedings: Vincent, the affable but clear-eyed defence attorney, and the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), dressed in devilish red and belligerent from the off. The audience’s allegiances naturally align with Daniel’s own—Vincent is familiar and safe, albeit with readily apparent biases, while the prosecutor is a dangerous unknown, rendered tantalising by his salacious version of the “truth”. By keeping the prosecution and defence on opposing sides of the court, at one point Triet makes a tennis match of Daniel’s conflicting opinions, the camera gliding from side to side as Daniel sits in the middle, his head tilting to and fro with the constancy of a pendulum.
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The verbal sparring matches are just one way that Triet brings each side’s story to life, both in context and as a filmmaker. One witness uses a to-scale model house in order to show the trajectory in which a body would fall, another displays 3D animations with realistic ragdoll effects and colour-coded points of impact, and another stages an in-person reenactment with a dummy being pushed out of a window, later played back on a small monitor in the courtroom. Each of these methods of visual storytelling, be they assisted with digital modelling or practical effects, serves to ground a specific version of events in reality. And yet each method also carries with it obvious constraints—the programmer failing to properly account for the bone density of a middle-aged man, for example, or the snowfall having been thicker when the dummy was tossed to its doom. In the end, as Daniel’s state-appointed ward Marge (Jehnny Beth) explains to him, “When we lack an element to judge something, and the lack is unbearable, all we can do is decide.” And so he chooses to believe. If you’re looking for any final commentary from Triet on the matter, Daniel’s choice ends up proving decisive for his mother’s case.
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In keeping with Triet’s penchant for unsolved questions, I’ll leave the exact mechanisms of Daniel’s manufactured belief a mystery for now, but what matters is the way that Triet revels in the fact that it’s exactly that—a decision. Regardless of the sniping character assassinations and conjecture presented as fact, Sandra’s guilt or innocence ultimately depends on which unreliable narrator each viewer chooses to believe. For some, hearing that Sandra cheated on her husband will be enough to irrevocably tar her integrity. For others, a surreptitiously recorded altercation between the two will position Samuel, as the one who documented and seemingly instigated the fight, as the antagonist. And, for others still, the natural empathy inherent to the camera’s frame and its main point of focus will place Sandra above suspicion. In cinema, as in all of life, we have to suspend aspects of our disbelief in order to embrace the reality of the story being told. What elements we decide to suspend, whether directed to by our own intuition or the compelling machinations of a third party, are as close to the truth as we’re ever likely to get.
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Blaise Radley is a freelance film critic based in Brixton. His writing has appeared in Little White Lies, The Quietus, and Cinema Year Zero, where he is a member of the editorial team, but you can find his thoughts most frequently (and least legibly) on Letterboxd.
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