User Reviews

If someone had told me that "Anatomie d'une chute" would make me add 50 Cent's "P. I. M. P." to my playlist, I probably wouldn't have known how to react. It was unexpected to see the presence of the theme in a French legal drama, and even more surprising was its prominence in addressing some of the film's central themes. But despite appearances, "Anatomie d'une chute" is anything but a typical dull legal drama.

I admit that your experience with this film may vary depending on your level of engagement with the work, as your experience will be greatly affected by how much this film can draw you into its world, its characters, and their nuances. At its core is a mysterious death.

There are various ways to approach this story. It could have been an investigative thriller in the style of David Fincher, but it's not. Justine Triet knows exactly what she wants to extract from it. She is more interested in showing it through the eyes of the people involved and does an astonishing job in this regard. Rather than the quest for the truth, the script is more concerned with how people react to the bits of information they come across. It also aims to demonstrate the complexity of human relationships and the path that leads to certain decisions in the lives of couples that can never be fully understood by an external audience filled with prejudices and snap judgments. The media attention surrounding the trial that occupies almost the entirety of the last two acts of this film demonstrates that the truth is not always the most important aspect. It also shows that the judgment of a specific moment or action is less significant for the audience than a character judgment that is always waiting to be passed.

The way this is all filmed surprised me greatly. Triet doesn't seek a classical and comfortable approach. The blocking is phenomenal, making us feel almost like intruders. The camera's movements are also unstable, approaching the emotionally unstable characters. It's a mastery that few possess, not because few know how to do it technically, but because few can do it so effectively, eliciting the emotional response desired from the audience. For instance, there's a scene in which a third party speaks about the deceased. The camera first focuses on Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), the son, who is visibly uncomfortable but tries to hide it. Then it shifts to Sandra (Sandra Hüller), and we can see the same discomfort in her as she tries to make eye contact with her son. It moved me and brought tears to my eyes. The foreground here wasn't the dialogue but how it was affecting these people.

What Milo Machado Graner, one of the most impressive performances by a young actor, and especially Sandra Hüller do in this film is sensational. Hüller brings an impressive array of expressive tools that always work according to the moment when they are put into action. When she tries to seduce, when she fights, when she opens up, when she closes off, when she feels invincible, when she feels vulnerable. Her micro-expressions and body language convey everything she has to say, and I must say that I consider this performance among the best I've ever seen. It's spine-chilling.

With this, I'm afraid I might be doing a disservice to the supporting actors, which would be unfair because they all deliver outstanding performances. In addition to the previously mentioned young actor, Swann Arlaud plays the eloquent defense lawyer and friend who becomes increasingly close to Sandra. Antoine Reinartz portrays a powerful prosecutor with a speech as intense as it is well-crafted. Samuel Theis shines in an incredible scene from the past. And speaking of that scene... what an immense kitchen argument, so well-crafted, packed with information, filled with conflicting emotions, repressed feelings, and expertly edited to the point where all you can do is open your mouth in admiration of such a work of art. After all, this film is about several falls, and no scene could better exemplify the most significant fall than that one.

Although this is not the easiest film to watch, demanding a lot from the viewer, especially until the end of the first act, the way everything unfolds, the development of its script, and the paths and destinations of its thematic approach are absolutely fascinating. It is one of the most realistically human films in its approach to unknown facts. It doesn't aim for flashy cinematic spectacle, but it provides plenty to engage your gray matter every time you think about it.

What happens inside each home is truly known only to those who live there. The truths. The half-truths. "Anatomie d'une chute" is a magnificent realistic exercise in the search for a truth that isn't always attainable, forcing everyone else to navigate in an uncertain but necessary zone of conscious decision-making. Sandra Hüller delivers one of the best performances in history. Period. Chilling.

At his home at a a chalet near Grenoble in France, a young partially sited boy takes his dog for a walk. When he returns he finds his father lying dead on the ground, apparently from a fall from above. The police arrive and after some investigation they charge the boy's mother Sandra (Sandra Hüller) with his murder.

You often see on the web the question - what is the difference between a Hollywood and a Foreign film. This film provides a shining example of an extremely European film and one that would not be made in Hollywood. Whilst it is riddled with clues as whether she did it or not, twists and turns and a fabulous courtroom drama, it never once takes its eye off the prize. There are no odd little vignettes about the characters and their lives away from the core issue and no pointless sub plots, just the fall and the fallout. The performances, particularly by Huller are really first rate and you find yourself completely sold by her compelling courtroom testimony - bewildering you as to whether it was murder, suicide or an accident all practically in the same scene. A first rate, grown up, nuanced thriller - not to be missed.

It's a legal drama set in the recent past in a chalet in the French Alps near Grenoble and a courtroom in Grenoble, France. It follows the investigation and trial of a female novelist charged with the death of her husband, also a novelist.

Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is a successful German novelist. While studying in Great Britain, she met her husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), a French-background university lecturer and aspiring novelist. They have an 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who suffered an injury at age four that seriously affected his eyesight. They have moved to Samuel's home community near Grenoble because he thought this would aid his writing. They speak English and French at home; Samuel doesn't speak German, and Sandra believes her French is not strong. Clearly, the marriage has been troubled since Daniel's accident, which took place in a traffic accident while Daniel was in Samuel's care.

The movie opens with Sandra being interviewed by a graduate student, Zoé Solidor (Camille Rutherford). Samuel is working in the chalet's attic, installing insulation and playing music louder and louder, forcing the interview to end. When Zoé leaves, Daniel takes his dog, Snoop, for a walk. When he returns, he discovers Samuel dead on the ground after a fall from the third-floor attic. Sandra claims she was asleep until she heard Daniel's scream.

The circumstances of Samuel's death launch an investigation. Did Samuel fall? Was he pushed? Did he jump? What caused his significant head wound? The authorities eventually charge Sandra with murder. Her lawyer, Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud), has an earlier history with Sandra and seems uncertain about his beliefs about her role. The trial does come to a believable conclusion.

Sandra Hüller and Milo Machado Graner give stunning performances. "Anatomy of a Fall" is one the best legal dramas I've seen for a long time. I can't speak to the accuracy of the French courtroom scenes; it's markedly different than North American and English courts in the wide-ranging manner of witness interrogation that involves the accused all along the way, and both the prosecutor and defense lawyers take great liberty to insert argument amid questioning. But the audience learns just a little more at each turn through the slow unfolding of Sandra's and Samuel's marriage through the testimony.

If you like legal dramas, "Anatomy of a Fall" is highly recommended.

Palme d'or meant high expectations while I was in the theater to see "Anatomy of a Fall", and it didn't disappoint.

The first part of the movie has the tone of a typical crime-piece. We as an audience are shocked by the Samuel's sudden (although expected) death in the first few minutes. Now we have a mystery to solve: how did Samuel die? Was he killed? If yes by whom? And how?

So we start following the attorneys and the investigators in the construction of a murder case against Samuel's wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller), and like them we try to solve this puzzle as we get spoon-fed its pieces: drops of blood, vague fragments of memories, recordings, past tragedies.. Each new piece of information presented to us before and during the trial shifts our opinion about the nature of Samuel's death, each new evidence is inconsistent with the previous one and adds up to a pile of confusion. We have enough to suspect, that's all.

Then start the stories. Defense and general attorneys, experts, psychologists.. Everyone writes their own narrative about Samuel's death. And much like Kurosawa's "Rashômon" (1952), each storyteller bends the facts to fit their personal envies and objectives: Sandra wants to stay with his son, Vincent (Swann Arlaud) wants Sandra to love him back, the psychologist needs to keep his 100% record of patients that didn't kill themselves. Even the press has its goals in it: "a writer killing her husband if much more interesting than a professor killing himself". At that point, we understand that it doesn't even matter if Sandra killed Samuel or not, or as Vincent said "we don't care about reality". We all want the story that makes sense.

So does Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). He discovers that he isn't only blind physically, but also blind about his family's past and his parents' relationship. Like the audience, he is shocked by each revelation and asks himself questions, investigates, and gets lost. His law-enforcer/baby-sitter Marge finally gets the key to him: "if you don't know what is real, then decide it yourself". Daniel tells his story, that turns out to be the best one. No way to know if the story is true. Maybe he just preferred the "suicidal father, innocent mother" to "killed father, killer mom". But one thing is sure, with his testimony, Daniel has reached the goal that her writer mother wanted to achieve in her books: blurring the lines between fiction and reality.

Top notch acting by Milo Machado Graner, Sandra Hüller, Antoine Reinhartz, Swann Arlaud, and of course Snoop; I hope he isn't thirsty anymore.

9/10.

I was excited to see this movie because several people had recommended it, but I really didn't think it was all that good. Maybe I'm just too American to understand the French courts, but everything about the legal proceedings seemed ridiculous to me. Like suspicion even being cast on the wife without a shred of actual evidence, they simply say "these bruises aren't what we'd expect, his wife must have killed him". They badgered a child to get the results they want, taking his word as truth until he changed his mind and then their legal standing was "no takesies-backsies". The first witness is lead by the prosecutor like a dog to say the things he wanted, they read fiction literature in a court room as evidence to the authors character, people would just jump up and start cross-examining whenever they felt like it. If this is how it works in France, I'm mortified. When the movie hurt a dog to make a stupid point I started to check out, not only that but the court seemed to consider the "dog experiment" as actual evidence. The last 10 minute to me were the most confusing part. Like there was a perfect moment for an ending, I even said "aaaaaand credits" only to get 10 more minutes of.....? I don't really know what that ending was about, I kept waiting for some sort of reveal.

Again, maybe I just don't get the French courts, but this movie seemed extremely unlikely and felt very frustrating. If you're into European court dramas I guess check it out, but I think this was kind of meh.

I know, I know. It's my problem. A wonderfully acted, beautifully shot, two and a half hour french "whodunnit" and I feel cheated.

Most viewers, from the reviews I've read on here, got everything and more from this years winner at Cannes. But not me. To my shame, I waited and I waited, for that jaw dropping twist that I felt I deserved. I even stayed for the entire credits in the vain hope that there was a hidden denouement. But no. All I was left with was, did she or didn't she? (or did he?) I have enough stuff to worry about and adding to it like this isn't helping. It's bad enough having to spend the last twenty years never knowing what happened to Tony Soprano, now I have to ponder the fate of Samuel Maleski too.

Where to start? First of all, almost nothing happens in this film after the first 15 minutes. The rest is almost 100% talk.

Of the rest of the film, the only dramatic and interesting scene is a long flashback involving a slow-boil fight between wife and husband occurring a day before the husband's falling death. This is a great scene, while difficult to watch, and it's literally the only scene we get to see of the husband and wife together. It made me wonder if a better film might be found with more scenes showing the dynamics of their marriage and much less showing a dubious deep dive into French courtroom drama.

The writer/director eschews any physical drama altogether, so predictably cuts away from the marital fight the moment before the fight turns physical, giving us audio-only playback in the courtroom. This is a dodge intended to heighten the uncertainty over exactly what happened in that fight, and it feels both cowardly as a director and also manipulative.

As for the couple themselves, they are both hateful and unsympathetic, with the husband portrayed as an irredeemable ***hole blasting instrumental rap music in the house at ear-splitting volume while the wife is being interviewed by a graduate student. The nearly blind son mentions that he has to leave the house on occasions because he can't stand his father's music played at deafeningly high volumes. This begs the question, why should we care at all whether this ***hole father/husband jumped out a window or was pushed off a balcony by the wife?

Remarkably, the wife eventually reveals herself to be equally unsympathetic, admitting to numerous extramarital / lesbian flings starting in the year after the son's accident, and then in that fight showing explicit hostility to the very idea that there should be "reciprocity" in a marriage. She dissects her husband's psychological impediments like a surgeon dissecting a frog, which comes off as chilly, heartless cruelty in their argument. She defends stealing her husband's one great literary idea as her manifest destiny, since she was the writer first able to expand the idea from an outline to full-length novel. Clearly this is a couple that just needs to get divorced, but that would be too easy.

Most of the film is an agonizing slop through the French legal system, mostly in the form of the wife's trial for murder. Here we find very scant forensic evidence (blood spatter) pointing toward murder, which can easily be explained in the alternative scenario of suicide. In place of forensic evidence, the court dives into a highly dubious, oh-so-French psychoanalysis of the dynamics of the marriage, which is utterly irrelevant to distinguishing between murder and suicide. Extracting confessions of infidelity does not advance the case for murder and arguably advances the case of suicide. Equally, the magical discovery of an audio recording of the fight the day before the death plausibly argues for suicide at least as much as murder, because the wife so effectively destroys her husband's identity through the course of that fight. It's all utterly irrelevant to determining guilt or innocence. If this is how the French conduct murder trials, god help them.

Those who admire this film will say that it didn't settle for easy answers. Sadly, neither does the film seem to probe for any difficult answers. A received value holds that serious films must avoid taking easy ways out, but this reduces to a mere affectation, an easy way out in itself, in the absence of deeper digging.

I find myself struggling to pinpoint this movie's theme or project or point-of-view. While the filmmakers put many things on the table, they fail to explore anything deeply.

For example, the film can't work as a latter-day Scenes From A Marriage, not with the plot kills off one spouse right from the get go. And no, a flashback or two does not suffice for evoking a complex dynamic. Even after 150 minutes, we viewers don't come to know this marriage well or, for that matter really, either partner.

Likewise, it seemed like we might get some sort of, well, indictment of the French legal system. But in the end the system just works. A trial disturbingly filled with innuendo, paltry evidence and pure speculation finally ends with judges doing the right thing. So, not thematic.

And the script invokes disability but also doesn't plumb that thematically, certainly not from the boy's point of view. So disability functions here just as a prop, specifically for setting up the father's guilt.

That guilt concerns a random accident that occurred under the watch of a babysitter the father hired instead of picking the boy up from school himself. But the film hardly pursues the irrationality of carrying that burden.

The marriage in question involves two writers. Nevertheless, the viewer doesn't come away with the feeling of having seen a movie about writers or writing; you'd hardly even know that literature was important in their lives. One of Sandra's books emerges as a source of contention in her marriage because she'd borrowed an idea from an abandoned project of her husband's. And her husband has issues about finding time to write. And finally there's the silly idea of introducing her fiction as evidence at a trial, How To Murder Your Wife-style.

A potentially problematic choice, Sandra has a former lover represent her in court, but nothing of consequence develops on account of it.

Sandra has had sexual partners outside her marriage, but these are only off-screen characters, and we get no real sense of what they mean to her.

Sandra is a German who feels comfortable speaking English and who lives and goes on trial in France. We get suggestions that language and culture barriers present challenges, but ultimately this never gets developed.

Some anticlimactic scenes raise the question of how to pick up one's life after acquittal for a crime one (presumably) did not commit, but cannot do more than raise the question.

So finally, what do we have? Perhaps a kind of Concerto for Actor, namely Sandra Hüller, who is almost always on screen and who indeed delivers a range of emotions, albeit mostly muted. If the ending seems not fully resolved, that seems only like a buzz-generating strategy, something for viewers to argue about so that others will decide to see the movie for themselves. The suicide/crime, either way, never seemed real enough to me that I cared what "really" happened. Had their been, before the film, a true story, and had someone pitch to me making a documentary about it, I would have sent them back to the newspapers in search of better material.

It's always disappointing when a film aspires to greatness that it never achieves. Such is the case with the latest offering from French writer-director Justine Triet, whose allegedly suspenseful thriller is about as appetizing as a plate of tepid leftovers. This crime investigation/courtroom drama about the mysterious death of a middle-aged unsuccessful writer (Samuel Theis) who falls from the second story of his mountain chalet looks into whether his demise is due to suicide or murder, with his wife (Sandra Hüller), herself a best-selling author, being the prime suspect. Despite an intriguing premise, however, the movie is overlong, needlessly talky and inherently flat, with a cold, clinical, unengaging narrative and characters who engender no connection, compassion or empathy. In essence, this is a "whodunnit" that plays like an extended "whocares." Fault the screenplay here, which seeks to tell a tale in the same gripping vein as such great courtroom dramas as "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959) but that never achieves the level of tension, mystery and audience engagement needed to pull that off. The meticulously orchestrated script feels calculated and derivative virtually from start to finish, especially in its trial sequences, which explore an array of possible motives and explanations, including everything from infidelity to plagiarism to previous suicide attempts, that rely on often-implausible speculation and inflated conjecture to carry forward a proceeding that probably never should have ended up in court in the first place. What's more, the double entendre that is the picture's title is so obvious that any hopes of nuance, subtlety or profundity evaporate quickly once the failing nature of the couple's troubled relationship surfaces. While the film admittedly features a fine performance by Hüller, it's far from enough to rescue a picture with big aspirations that never pan out. How this release has garnered so much exaggerated awards season buzz is beyond me, especially given its intrinsically insipid, underwhelming, overstated character. There are plenty of other films of this ilk out there that are far more worth watching than this one, so grab one of those better selections instead and give this one the well-earned pass it genuinely deserves.

Amazing script, wonderful acting (Sandra Hüller is absolutely fantastic!), subtle music and skillful camera work: the film is interesting to watch, the twists are unpredictable and every next moment it digs deeper into the intricacies and imperfections in the relationship of a wealthy intellectual middle-aged couple. One of the partners appears emotionally stronger than the other, so they get over their family dramas and tragedies in different ways, to such an extent that it ends up with one of the partners dead and the other in court, charged with murder. This is how we are gradually exposed to the skeletons in their cupboards and feel free to recognize some of them as our own. Gives a lot of food for thought and discussion. Fantastic movie!