Review: "Anatomy of a Fall" Is a Sluggish, Pretentious Drama

In this overlong French flick, we learn why refusing to commit is the death of art.

November 16, 2023

Foreign films are always an intriguing venture. No, not because we must endure the frustration of darting our eyes from subtitles to on-screen melodrama, but because we often question our perceptions.

How often have we observed another culture and thought, “Why are they eating that?” or “How is that outfit comfortable?” or “How are they losing so many wars?”

Such is the nature of the French, but watching French films means more than rumination on their historical military defeats. In Anatomy of a Fall's case, it’s a comparison of judicial practice that challenges viewers to reconsider how they assess film.

During a particularly probing direct examination of Sandra, a woman on trial for the death of her husband, the prosecutor defies every tenet of the American legal system. His questions are always speculative or argumentative; he makes numerous statements of opinion that assume facts not in evidence and routinely cuts off the witness to offer conjecture in place of testimony.

For an American, the proceedings are baffling, a deviation so extreme it feels surreal: surely this can’t be how they do things in France?

As many French commenters have relayed, it is, and there lies the rub. A viewer’s responsibility is to challenge themselves when faced with the unfamiliar, to embrace it and analyze its application in the story. Foreign films offer this opportunity more than any other, regardless of genre. For example, the differences in vocal inflection can resonate deeply with the home culture but go entirely over the head of another. It’s only natural. We have 8 billion people in 196 countries. Contrary to what society's gatekeepers believe, it’s reasonable not to identify with another culture.

But as we observe Anatomy of a Fall, we reconsider how much this balance between understanding and challenge should influence our perspective. No matter how much challenge we invite, quality is king. Anatomy of a Fall, though staged to appear otherwise, is of low quality, and no amount of appreciation for observing a different approach to the subject matter or a display of competing legal idealogy changes that.

The film begins with the death of husband and father, Samuel. When his novelist wife, Sandra, welcomes an interviewer into their home, Samuel disrupts the conversation by blasting the instrumental of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.,” causing such a disturbance that Sandra ends the interview prematurely. The couple’s blind son, Daniel, takes the family dog for a walk but returns to find Samuel’s corpse lying in the snow.

Did he jump? Did Sandra push him? What does it all mean? What will it all say? It truly aims to be, at least on paper, an anatomy of a fall.

Yet, nothing actually gets anatomized, so it is an anatomy of nothing. It tries desperately to trick us into believing otherwise by being unnecessarily long and refusing to commit to anything; abstraction is the weapon of the unwise. The more uncommitted something is, the more we want to commit to it. If only we can dissect it from a different angle or contemplate it from a different perspective, we’ll find our way to what no one else sees. We do the same with people, falsely convincing ourselves that those we pursue possess virtue they lack, leading to even unhappier unions than the one between Sandra and Samuel.

The closest it gets to meaning is when it shifts to Daniel’s perspective and makes itself solely about his developing feelings about the trial and the conclusions he draws from sitting with them, whether he’s listening to the vicious argument between his parents or hearing excerpts from the book that mirror his mother’s seeming real-life perceptions. Milo Machado-Graner is the best actor in the film by far, and that isn’t a lack of appreciation for how few chest-heaving moments Sandra Hüller gets; he laps the field a dozen times over.

It’s a shame; the film is so focused on being unfocused, trying to lure us into believing it’s something it isn’t, that it wastes the opportunity as it capitalizes on it. Daniel’s ultimate conclusion regarding his father’s death and the decision to testify in the trial has the opportunity to be a gut punch that would leave an audience questioning themselves as much as the characters on screen. In fact, the film's philosophical ambition exists within Daniel; his experience - as his innocence gets destroyed by the reality of his parent’s dynamic - inspires such social questions.

Unfortunately, the movie mistakes itself for being more profound than it is and thus more effective at delivering on its promises, but it never does. It adores itself for making a callback to the prosecutor’s claim that Sandra used alcohol to get the ball rolling on a sexual pursuit by showing her using wine to manipulate her husband in the big fight scene. Sadly, those details only satisfy Americans who wear berets to rundown arthouse theaters. A film has to sustain itself and follow through.

Sandra is borderline psychopathic in how little concern she has for Samuel’s feelings, and knowing she’s been unfaithful makes her callous dismissiveness all the more troubling. Director Justine Triet wants to parallel our tendency to draw broad conclusions based on partial information with the prosecution’s attempt to paint an accurate picture of Sandra and Samuel’s marriage using only Samuel’s therapy session.

Aside from being too heavy-handed in this pursuit to make an impact, it also rings false because Samuel’s perspective is too damning to lend Sandra’s any credence. She refuses to take responsibility for her infidelity, blaming Samuel for his lack of vision and ambition, as though either is pertinent to the topic or an excuse for her behavior. She makes no apologies, shows no remorse, and the most she can muster is a half-hearted aim at splitting the difference. Since the film never comes close to selling us on Sandra as a viable suspect, even as it hints at Daniel holding some trump card he’ll use to send his own mother to prison, nothing it tries to accomplish lands.

Without giving Sandra’s side the legitimacy to make her and Samuel’s conflict feel sincere and thus solidify the movie’s attempts to say something about society as a whole, we get left wishing it’d focused on Daniel instead of trying to address everything from a distance.

Imagine an ending where Daniel, having decided to testify to his father’s diminished psychological state, thus effectively absolving his mother, drops a simple line to his mother as she leaves his room later that night. Does Daniel truly know what happened? Has he decided it doesn’t matter? What was his motive in making his choice? It would’ve been a rare occasion where ambiguity, laced with legitimacy for both sides, would’ve spoken volumes.

If nothing else, Anatomy of a Fall offers insight into two things:

1. American film snobs’ tendency to adore anything foreign on principle, as though it makes them superior.

2. How important it is to commit.

No, not to being too long, glacially-paced, or so empty that the strongest reaction is the frustration of having nothing worthy of reaction, but to your convictions. If a movie wants us to question, examine, dissect, and conclude, it must give us something to question, examine, dissect, and conclude about; Anatomy of a Fall rejects this reality and replaces it with one of its own.

Sadly, that reality is as follows:

Relegate the film’s saving grace to the background so we can exploit the limp primary narrative, employing its abstraction to seem insightful when it actually has nothing to offer and even less to say.

Anatomy of a Fall’s only real value is helping us understand that, despite the foundational differences that exist as we reach across the world’s innumerable cultures, and as fascinating as that journey can be to take on screen, undergoing it doesn’t make the movie good. It can enlighten a tad, but that’s not enough. We must dig deeper, dive so far below the surface we leave little time to come up for air. If a movie tries to incite that but cannot inspire it, it fails: it falls, and that fall would be far more interesting to anatomize than Samuel’s.