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French Anatomie d'une chute
Directed by Justine Triet
Release dates
21 May 2023 (Cannes)[2]
23 August 2023 (France)[3]
Running time 152 minutes[4]
Country France[5]
Languages
French[5]
English[5][a]
==
Anatomy of a Fall (French: Anatomie d'une chute) is a 2023 French legal drama film,[5][10] directed by Justine Triet from a screenplay she co-wrote with Arthur Harari. It stars Sandra Hüller as a writer trying to prove her innocence in her husband's death. Appearing in supporting roles are Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado-Graner, Antoine Reinartz, Samuel Theis, Jehnny Beth, Saadia Bentaieb, Camille Rutherford, Anne Rotger, and Sophie Fillières.
The film premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2023, where it won the Palme d'Or and the Palm Dog Award, and competed for the Queer Palm. It was released theatrically in France by Le Pacte on 23 August 2023, receiving critical acclaim, selling over 1.9 million admissions in France, and winning six awards at the 49th César Awards, including Best Film. The film also received five nominations at the 96th Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director (Triet), Best Actress (Hüller), and won Best Original Screenplay.
Plot
In an isolated mountain chalet near Grenoble, novelist Sandra Voyter decides to reschedule her interview with a female student because her husband, university lecturer Samuel Maleski, plays music loudly in their attic, disrupting the interview. After the student drives away from the chalet, Sandra's visually impaired son, Daniel, takes a walk outside with his guide dog Snoop. When they return home, Daniel finds Samuel dead from an apparent fall.
Sandra insists that the fall must have been accidental. Her old friend and lawyer, Vincent, suggests the possibility of suicide, while Sandra recalls her husband's attempt to overdose on aspirin six months earlier, after going off antidepressants. After an investigation, Daniel's conflicting accounts of what happened shortly before his father's death, combined with the revelation that Samuel sustained a head wound before his body hit the ground and an audio recording of a fight by Samuel and Sandra the previous day, Sandra is indicted on charges of homicide.
During the trial, Sandra's defense team claims Samuel fell from the attic window and hit his head on a shed below, while the prosecution posits that Sandra hit him with a blunt object and pushed him from the second-floor balcony. During a courtroom argument with Samuel's psychiatrist, Sandra admits her resentment towards her husband due to his partial responsibility for the accident that led to Daniel's impaired vision.
In the recorded fight, Samuel accuses Sandra of plagiarism, infidelity and exerting control over his life, before their protracted argument turns physically violent. The prosecution claims that all the violence came from Sandra. She counters that while she had slapped Samuel, the rest of the violence heard was her husband beating on himself. After Sandra admits to an affair with a woman the year before Samuel's death, the prosecution argues that Samuel's loud music indicated jealousy over Sandra's flirting with the interviewer, leading to the physical confrontation later. The prosecutor also notes Sandra's pattern of writing personal conflicts into her stories, and how murdering her husband mirrors a minor character's thoughts from her most recent novel. In turn, Sandra protests that one recording does not represent the nature of their relationship, nor do the words of a character in a novel reflect her own inclinations.
A distraught Daniel insists on testifying before closing arguments the following Monday. The judge lays strict ground rules to prevent anyone from influencing his testimony and brings in a court monitor, Marge. Daniel then asks that Sandra leave their house for the weekend so he can be alone with Marge and Snoop. He recalls that when Samuel overdosed, Snoop also fell sick, possibly due to having eaten Samuel's vomit. He then deliberately feeds Snoop aspirin and finds it has the same effect, which aligns with Sandra's testimony. Daniel confides to Marge his anguish, and she advises him that if he doesn't know what is really true, he can instead decide what's true for him.
On the witness stand, Daniel says he can comprehend his father taking his own life but not the murder scenario. He says that when he and Samuel were driving Snoop to the veterinarian, Samuel spoke about the need to be prepared that those he loves will die and to know that his life will go on, which Daniel now interprets as his father's own suicidal thoughts; Sandra is acquitted after Daniel's testimony. When she returns home, Daniel tells her he was afraid of her homecoming and she says that she was too; the two embrace. As Sandra heads to bed, she lingers at a photo of her and Samuel before falling asleep with Snoop.
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