Courtroom dramas are one of my favorite genres. Films like Primal Fear, A Few Good Men, The Lincoln Lawyer, and A Time to Kill come to mind and remind me of why I love this genre. Anatomy Of a Fall is another such film. It asks us to question what we believe in favor of what we would actually do if we were in this circumstance. It is not an easy question to answer. The foreign aspects of the court setting also bring some interesting elements to the movie. The director and writers keep us on our toes from the beginning to the end of this film. There is a reason it won the Palme D’or at this year’s Festival De Cannes.

Sandra (Sandra Huller) is an author of fictional books but they are taken from her real life quite a bit. She lives with her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), their blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), and his seeing-eye dog Snoop. This isn’t the most normal family though. She had a friend over for a literary interview and her husband was upstairs playing loud music. Enough so she had to cancel the interview.  Once the interview was over their son left to go on a walk with his dog and when he came back his dog noticed his father was lying dead on the ground outside their home in a pool of blood. 

The death of the husband results in an investigation and a subsequent trial where this film really picks up steam. The filmmaker Justine Triet uses various ways to tell this story. The most obvious way is the trial where both lawyers or advocates as they are called in Europe. This is a French film with some English spoken. The advocates try to shape their arguments with various witnesses and so forth. The odd part for American audiences is that there isn’t much of a structure to this. Whoever has something to say gets up or stands up and says what they want to say as long as it’s in line with the trial and the judge says it’s OK. A trial over in France is a little different than here. Still very interesting though.

The second way she tries to tell this story is that there is a recording introduced into evidence. As the recording starts to play the actual event transpired in front of our very eyes. I never saw something like this before in a courtroom drama. This scene was vividly realized and went to show some of the issues this couple had. That may or may not have led to the death of the husband. The third thing she did was use reenactments and props to show what could have happened.  These were effective and showed how the man could have fallen or got hit and thrown over the guardrail but they didn’t do much to show the drama that was going on between these two people. The recording was great evidence.

As this was mostly a European cast I wasn’t that familiar with most of them. With that being said a couple of them really stood out to me. Those were Huller as this woman who lost her husband, yes they weren’t getting along, but she had to still defend herself in this trial regarding how she still loved him and wouldn’t kill the father of their child. Huller gives an Academy Award-worthy performance as this woman. She does a lot of the heavy lifting with many scenes with a lot of dialogue in French and English. She has to come across as very sympathetic to the jury but also gives reasons for various things that are brought up in the trial. Huller is exceptional in this role.

The second is Graner, the boy who played the blind son. He had a few very emotional scenes where he was balling his eyes out and others where he had to give witness testimony about what he saw, where he was, and how as a blind boy his memory could be misconstrued. He did one thing I thought was a bit reprehensible but I understood why he did it. I just didn’t like the fact that he did something so bad. I don’t want to spoil it though. It’s a key aspect of the trial so no spoilers here. This kid was amazing though and he and many others are the reason why there needs to be an under-18 years of age Academy Award acting category. He will probably be forgotten though come awards season except for those awards bodies that have that category already. 

There are a few morally ambiguous parts of this film. The main one is what kind of thing would get somebody so upset they would kill their husband?  Families have all kinds of domestic issues and get through them. Affairs and so forth are just the tip of the iceberg. In this day and age, women have started to overshadow men when it comes to their careers. They have started to become more successful in various professions that were dominated by men. Writing is one of them and their both writers but one is more successful than the other and there’s resentment there. Through some financial issues and some sadness due to the accident that caused their son to go blind and you can see how the husband isn’t that nice of a guy to be around. Is he worth killing though, that’s the million-dollar question. 

The other moral quandary is what would a child do to keep his only living parent from going to jail or worse the electric chair/ guillotine. Would any of us watching this film lie for our mothers? That’s a big question this film asks. I come out on I wouldn’t lie for my mother but me and her didn’t get along much before she passed away twenty years ago or so. This kid would be stuck with no family to take care of him and that’s not a good thing. Even I can see that side of things. It’s hard to tell right from wrong in these scenarios.  That’s what makes this film so great. The moral ambiguity. 

Anatomy of a Fall is one of the best films of the year, no matter what country it comes from. In this case France. It wasn’t nominated for France’s international film selection though because of all the English language that was spoken in it. Close to half if I had to make a guess. The courtroom scenes were riveting and the various ways Triet chose to reenact some of the events were brilliant. One sequence I had never seen done like this before. The acting by all was good but Huller and Graner were both incredible in their respective roles. In a just world, they’d both get nominated for Academy Awards, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor. This film’s subtitles or otherwise were very fascinating. I learned a lot about how European courts run, and how trials are handled. As well as how lawyers work on their cases beforehand. This is a masterpiece of filmmaking by any standard.

5 stars

Dan Skip Allen