A person once shared with me that the highest cost of being in a marriage occurs when partners remain silent during their disagreements. Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall understands this completely, though it pretends to be about something else for nearly two and a half hours.
Sandra Voyter is a successful novelist. Her husband Samuel was not a successful novelist. The film explores a situation which most people have experienced when they share housing costs with someone who earns more than they do. The Alpine chalet they shared appeared to be an expensive property to heat because of its numerous windows and its wooden structure which was visible to the eye. Samuel, we learn, sold a previous home to finance this move to the mountains. His money, her career ascendant. The unbalanced elements exist as an unfulfilled financial obligation which runs throughout all the movie's visual components.
Sandra becomes the subject of murder investigations when Samuel dies after he falls through the attic window into the snow-covered area. What follows is a procedural, technically. The legal process included her court appearances and her work with forensic experts and her defense lawyer Vincent who delivered his services through his quiet professional approach which indicated his high hourly rates and his worth of every dollar. But Triet isn't really interested in whether Sandra pushed her husband. She needs to learn about the methods which people use to establish their mutual financial duties.
The court presents their last argument through Sandra while outside viewers begin to concentrate on the couple's shared marital property. Samuel accuses her of stealing his book idea. She fires back that she sacrificed for his failed career too. "I didn't steal anything. I took something that was lying there."The situation appears completely devastating because all my previous relationships with partners have shown this exact pattern of disagreement about who should make concessions.
Sandra Hüller delivers this performance through her complete absence of emotional connection with viewers during the entire production. She delivers her lines with exactness while showing occasional coldness and occasional charm throughout the performance which avoids both victim and guilty character portrayals. She breaks into laughter at an unsuitable moment while the witness is testifying. She appears in another scene while showing extreme sadness. Triet and Hüller seem to have agreed that consistency is for people who aren't on trial. The real gamble is putting this much weight on Milo Machado-Graner as Daniel, the couple's partially blind son who has to decide whether to believe his mother. The boy stands out as someone who is truly special. Those courtroom scenes where he's listening to his parents fight, trying to locate something solid, are harder to watch than any of the forensic reconstruction.
The prosecution repeatedly returned to Sandra's cheating and her bisexual identity and her professional achievements during the trial. As if wanting more than what you have constitutes motive. The film contains a gender politics interpretation which I will not discuss in detail but it achieves this interpretation through its gradual build-up of evidence instead of using direct proof. You need to determine which evidence backs each argument and which evidence lacks any form of recognition.
The snow-covered mountains present an expensive appearance which creates a sense of complete isolation. The dog, Snoop, ends up being more useful to the verdict than half the expert witnesses. The actual outcome of the case becomes less important than other factors.
Anyway. The movie shows how two characters maintained emotional debts which grew into a fatal snowbank death. Whether it was murder or not is almost beside the point. The marriage was already bankrupt.
