MA 15+, 152 minutes
5 stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
As they must, it’s the small details that matter on the day a man dies, suddenly and mysteriously, after falling from the upper floor of a chalet in the alps. In the background there are glorious mountains, in the foreground a family tragedy that has led to a dead body in the snow outside as the hunt for clues begins.
In the interior scenes before the death, a ball bounces down the chalet’s stairs as a collie dog chases after it. It is distracting the woman who is having an interview with a visiting journalist. As the camera interrogates their faces, searching for clues about their interaction, something begins to jar. Upstairs there is someone playing piano, loudly and forcefully, before a boy leaves the house on a walk with his dog. In total, it’s not much to go on, we know there is violence to follow, and when it arrives, it arrives without warning.
It is heart-breaking that Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) comes across his father’s body when he returns from his walk, though he is perhaps spared the worst, as he is partially blind. Whether Sam (Samuel Theis) tumbled from an attic window or from a balcony beneath, becomes crucially important in the ensuing investigation and court case that sees the dead man’s wife, Daniel’s mother, Sandra (German actor Sandra Huller), accused of murder.
In an extraordinarily deft performance, actor Sandra Huller sure keeps us guessing
Sandra sure keeps us wondering. She can be read as a bisexual woman whose success as a writer has been won on the back of a put-upon husband, who also yearns for literary success. Or as a woman mystified, hurt and angered by her partner’s resentful behaviour, who refuses to carry the blame for his malaise and lack of productivity.
It’s said that the director and co-writer Triet avoided telling Huller whether her character was guilty of murder or not. The uncertainty has surely help draw an extraordinarily deft performance from her. The screenplay was a collaboration between Triet and her partner Arthur Harari.
Furthermore, Sandra is compromised by being German, by being gay, or gay some of the time, and perhaps also by being the successful partner in a fraught marriage. As the dialogue slips between the English that Sandra is comfortable with and the French with which she is not, her slower and sometimes faltering French suggests she may have something to hide. The star of Toni Erdmann and Zone of Interest is a formidable actor.
Huller’s isn’t the only remarkable performance here. As her friend Master Vincent, a lawyer it so happens, Swann Arlaud’s performance alternates between the compassion of a friend, (and perhaps even potential lover), and the scepticism that his professional training has fostered. I have admired the actor since his farmer driven to desperate measures in the small gem of 2017, Bloody Milk (aka Petit Paysan).
The subjectivity of expert opinion is laid bare in the trial, as is the eagerness of members of the public for scandal
Despite but brief moments on screen, the extended re-enactment of the argument between Sam and Sandra the day before he dies, the actor Theis also makes a formidable impression. During the altercation, based on a recording that Sam had made secretly to assist with his drafting ‘autofiction’, their marriage is laid bare. It may not have even been doomed and maybe even survived Sandra’s infidelity, but, as the frictions of their relationship are exposed, the scenes blaze with the excoriating intensity of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage.
The subjectivity of expert opinion is also laid bare in Sandra’s trial. As well as the eagerness of members of the general public for scandal, the aggressive drive and snide manner of a court prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) and the partisan evidence of Samuel’s psychoanalyst. All are exposed under the film’s forensic gaze.
From the outset, the drama proceeds with confidence and precision until its final moments, two and a half hours later. Exquisitely well put together and free of controversial gimmicky or ultra-violence as it studies a murder trial from all possible angles, it was a very deserving winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year.
This anatomy of a fall is as much a subtle dissection of legal processes as it is an enquiry into underlying community attitudes towards people who seem different, divergent or outsider. Life is always so much more complicated than the convenient labels bandied around, as this enthralling film so ably demonstrates.
First published in the Canberra Times on 27 January 2024. Jane’s reviews are also published at Rotten Tomatoes