French filmmaker Justine Triet has just become the third woman in history to have won the much-coveted top award of the global festival industry, the Palme d’Or, for her fourth feature-length film, Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d’une Chute).

Her trophy handed by the iconic Jane Fonda – who, coincidentally or not, opened her presentation with a short anecdote about her first year in Cannes, 1963, saying that people didn’t even think there was anything wrong about the fact that the festival only featured male directors – Triet held a speech like none of her two predecessors (Jane Campion, heavily pregnant at the time, was absent from the 1993 ceremony; Julia Ducournau, who was also present in this year’s jury, was profoundly emotional in 2021 and apologized for the film’s imperfections). She delivered a harsh critique of how recent protests in France were suppressed by the authorities, decrying a political climate that is repressive and neoliberal, which even affects local film production, finishing off by dedicating her award to “all young female and male directors and to those who today are unable to make films”.

Anatomy of a Fall makes its intensions clear – especially in terms of formality – from the very get-go. See its first shot, featuring a ball rolling down the staris, chased by family pet Snoop (performed by canine actor Messi, winner of this year’s Palme Dog; and it just so happens that this is the first film in history to win both the d’Or and the Dog), followed by a scene in which a student is interviewing protagonist Sandra (Hüller, actress of the year at Cannes, who also counted The Zone of Interest under her belt). 

Sipping from a glass of red wine in the comfort of her home, the German writer seems much less interested in discussing her own work – a mix between truth and fiction that relies heavily on its seed of truth, as the discussion reveals – as she is in finding out more about her counterpart; their entretien is, however, brutally interrupted by the deafening sound of a speaker playing a cover of 50 Cent’s rap anthem P.I.M.P., on repeat. Shortly afterwards, the one to play the disruptive song – Sandra’s husband, Samuel, himself an aspiring writer – is found lying dead in the snow by their visually-impaired son, Daniel; the gash on his head (or cranio-cerebral traumatism) raises suspicion during the autopsy.

From here on, Samuel, who was absent from the screen in the last minutes oif his life, will only reappear in flashbacks, each of which can be attributed to the subjective perspective of one of the characters – following the tradition opened up by Errol Morris’ Thin Blue Line, these scenes present hypothetical visual narration that often conflict each-other, illustrations meant to underline the (potentially) deceptive nature of cinematic representation. And it’s deception in particular – especially alongside ambiguity, subjectivity and perspective – that is the thematic meat that Triet attaches to the film’s formal skeleton, especially once Sandra is indicted under the accusation of having murdered her husband.

Said formal skeleton heavily relies on more than just POV shots (see the camera’s movement from left to right during Daniel’s testimony, or the fact that the prologue and epilogue are arguably attributable to Snoop’s perspective, thus turning him into the spectator’s diegetic analogue), but also on intermediality. From personal phots to hidden audio recordings; from taped testimonies to (faux) television broadcasts of shows that cover the case – all of this sets the film’s thematic apparatus into motion, and none of it is 100% reliable: any given statement has a speculative seed at its heart – here, the art of rhetoric is one of convincement, rather than demonstration.

„I don’t give a fuck about what is reality”, Sandra’s lawyer says at one point, in one of the film’s many quoteable lines – and in this sense, Anatomy of a Fall is a film that, beyond its mostly classical narrative structure, and more or less subtly, constantly announces its own intentions. Together with the fact of being an (anti-)genre film, it’s also one that explores the notion of family – what happens in a family that is scarred by a violent trauma and by a trial that turns into a media spectacle? What does it mean to take care of a child with disabilities? What is the endpoint of mutual responsibility in a couple; what are the limits of reciprocity within its decision-making process? And what happens when a family that is not particularly in line with society’s heteronormative perceptions is put under the microscope by a judicial system that often has sexist biases?

Triet’s answer does not lack in humor – “It’s a song with extremely misogynistic lyrics”, the prosecutor says while commenting on the disruptive song from the beginning, prompting one of the lawyers to react, in exasperation: “It’s an instrumental version!!!”. Ironically enough, it’s precisely the aggressive prosecutor who is suspiciously misogynistic, leading his interrogation in a manner that exploits lingering patriarchal sentiments within the thinking of the trial’s witnesses and experts – amongst an entire litany of faults, Sandra is accused of having had a “castrating attitude” in her relationship with Samuel.

Anatomy of a Fall is not at all dissimilar from another recent major French title, one that also lys out feminist discursive aims (while sharing the thematic focus on the ontology of truth/realtity) within the context of a trial: Alice Diop’s Saint Omer. In contrast to it, Anatomy relies much more heavily on artifice to reach its aims, whereas Diop constructed a very rigorous apparatus that, through its very formality, answered the questions that Triet opens up by mixing up various formats. Of course, the different nature of the cases at the heart of their respective films also plays a role – here, the questions is “what happened?”, there, it was “why did it happen?”; plus, Omer also opened up a critical line of thought regarding racism – but, at the end of the day, the fact that the same national cinema has produced these two films in a considerable short span of time is definitely a condemnation of a (local, but also worldwide) judicial climate where women are often put to trial for the crime of belonging to their geneder. Maybe this is where one may see an element of subversiveness in the jury’s decisions – it’s quite natural to think of the contrast with festival opener Jeanne du Barry, or rather, of how the ex-wife of its leading actor was crucified in front of the global public opinion.

As Daniel lies in bed, crying his heart out, Sandra caresses his head and tells him that “Things will be like this for a while”. The things that she is alluding to are more than the trauma of violently losing a parent and all of its associated emotions – they also include the permanence of a past that bursts to the fore in all of its painful and contradictory details, of a social climate wherein misogyny is the source of spectacle and humiliation, of a world that wantonly craves easily-palateable “truths” and thus cannot stomach the ambiguities of intimate daily life. Although Anatomy of a Fall is a film that is far from perfect, it’s certainly a correct one – and the Palme will definitely amplify the echoes of its socio-political objectives, hopefully along with the questions that are born out of its self-reflexive structure.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.