Ye be warned. This article contains spoilers about the film Anatomy of a Fall.
Trite as one can be in the wrong hands, there is nothing quite like a great courtroom drama for probing basic human questions about truth and justice and for lingering in the mind of the viewer because, truth is, there are often no easy answers to be had.
Anatomy of a Fall, from French director Justine Triet, is the latest in this rich cinematic tradition. And this is a tradition that spans both the globe and decades of film history - from Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon to Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder to, much more recently, Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel.
Though these four films (and many others like them) are set in wildly disparate places and eras, they share the same basic setup and underlying philosophy about truth-seeking. There is a horrifying crime, followed by accusations of guilt. There is a trial or interrogation of some sort that reveals more information, but, because it comes from so many different sources and because all human beings always have an agenda of some sort, the picture gets more murky, not less.
Each of these films aims its gaze at different parts of the overall equation. Preminger, for example, fixates on the theatricality of the courtroom itself and how that influences the perception of truth. Scott traffics in internal narrative - the stories we tell ourselves before we even begin to justify our actions to others. Triet’s twist is to ask - and not answer - how we should move forward once we get all the information we’re going to get and the answers remain inconclusive.
Anatomy of a Fall is a brilliant, deliberate frustration. Rather than picking up after the alleged crime - the murder-or-is-it-suicide of writer Sandra Voyter’s husband Samuel Maleski - it starts just prior. Voyter, an acclaimed writer, sits with a student for an interview that is spoiled because her husband, offscreen and upstairs, is blasting an instrumental version of the song “P.I.M.P.” at such a volume that conversation is barely possible and concentration certainly isn’t.
Voyter, played by Sandra Huller, telegraphs agitation, but she never becomes visibly angry. Is she embarrassed? Furious? She swirls a glass of wine in the middle of the day, which can be read as anxiety or even flirtatiousness. The interviewer leaves, and so does Sandra’s son, Daniel, to take his dog for a walk, and we’re off on a runaway train of speculation even before Samuel tumbles to his death.
The entire film unfurls in this way - the investigation and subsequent trial revealing more and more about both Samuel’s final days and hours and the years of strain between the married couple. None of the many revelations are cut and dry - not even a surreptitiously recorded argument between Sandra and Samuel the day before his death that eventually escalates to physical violence. It’s a seemingly damning moment until you wonder why there is a secret recording at all, especially when know Samuel is an aspiring writer in his own right, one who might be tapping in to his own life for source material.
We learn fact after fact after fact about Sandra Voyter and her husband. She based her first novel on a passage of his writing. He engineered a move away from London and back to his hometown in France. And so on.
We learn all these facts and yet we never approach any sort of truth about whether Samuel was killed or killed himself. Even the very language that is being spoken is at issue; Sandra and Samuel spoke English to each other - her French unreliable enough that she goes in and out of it as she testifies. How much is being literally lost in translation?
Daniel, standing in for us, is overwhelmed not just by what he is learning about his parents but by the sheer amount that he is learning. He is not just caught in the middle of an impossible situation, he is a key witness whose testimony is likely to swing the case. When he asks his court-appointed minder how to determine the truth, she offers him little in the way of quarter. At some point, we must decide what’s true for us, she counsels.
This, it seems to me, is the right thing to say to the boy. It’s also a very dangerous sentiment, especially in the so-called “post-truth” era in which we now reside. Indeed, this is the kind of story that makes the trial by combat in The Last Duel suddenly look appealing. There’s a finality to that kind of justice that starts to look good when satisfaction via “truth” becomes more remote.
Triet isn’t casting her lot with Kellyanne Conway, but she does seem to be saying that there is a lot of territory between obvious lies and the cold, hard truth. If we shouldn’t be fooled by clear fabrications, we also shouldn’t be naive enough to think that we’ll always be able to discern the truth if we just try hard enough.
Daniel’s final testimony seems designed to help himself move on as much as anything else. On the stand, he recounts a retroactively prescient conversation with his father about death in the months prior that makes him seem like he might have been pondering suicide for awhile. Samuel is talking to Daniel about his sick dog, but, as presented by Daniel, it seems like a thinly veiled message from a depressed man about how he - not the dog - might not be around forever.
Could be. Or, it could be the kind of relatively innocuous thing a father says to his son as he grows up to prepare him for the realities of life.
We crave finality and certainty in a story like this, but in the case of Anatomy of a Fall, it would greatly cheapen the story and its characters if we were handed an easy answer. We can collect a great many facts, but we can never collect them all. Truth can be ascertained, but not always and not absolutely. Getting past that fact means just that - getting past it, if not necessarily over it.