Zero is the loneliest number. This crossed my mind searching for critical reviews of Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning French film Anatomy of a Fall this week and precisely finding none. I was urged by literally everyone in my orbit to see it, the recommendations arriving in person, by text and over the din of the phone set to speaker while driving. I’d absorbed the topic from these conversations given I started confusingly asking Siri the session times for Anatomy of a Marriage. And the film’s title and explanatory poster once I arrived at the correct film – a lifeless bloodied body with a huddled pair to the side calling in emergency services – augured well. Was it an accident, murder or death by suicide? The only witness, the luckless victim’s vision-impaired 11-year-old son.
What can only be described as a cautionary tale about rural isolation, professional ambition and drinking alcohol with lunch, the utter silliness of Anatomy of a Fall begins with a cranked-up cover of 50 Cent's 'P.I.M.P. played on repeat in the film’s opening scene, and finishes with a fanciful French courtroom trial in which a rhetorically flamboyant prosecutor and defence lawyer hammer out the nature and specificity of this unhappy marriage in three languages supported by bootleg tapes of their fights.
I’m not down on it for being so unapologetically “European Arthouse”, shorthand for a style of filmmaking with a lot of dialogue about serious subjects in bourgeois settings, though as the kids say, I did find it triggering.
So many revolting fantasies course through this film. The most offensive is the view that disability – in this case, Daniel’s blindness after a childhood accident – is a tragedy from which it is impossible to recover, certainly not the parents who can’t get past it, or the child for that matter, judging by his mopey friendless life in which avoids the misery of his parents by taking his dog Snoop for a walk. Daniel insists on attending the trial, gazed upon balefully by his mother in the stand, who is sorry, not sorry, he is learning the sordid details of his parents’ relationship in the stadium environment of the courthouse. Rather than offering protection, immature adults are gratified their children can really “know the truth”.
With little tenderness, kindness, connection or warmth between family members in the home, the striking absence of emotional intimacy turns into court mandated avoidance as the film progresses. I’m not certain why this is so distressing except that in inverting public and private domain so fully the film achieves a rare bleakness ameliorated only by the reassuring presence of Snoop.
The terrible issue eating away at Sandra Voyters and Samuel Maleski’s marriage is creative frustration and a sore lack of professional recognition for one of the individuals inside it. Anatomy of a Fall’s view which the film reinforces through this binary of professional success and failure is that an “actualised” life is the only one worth living. Little rang true except the inevitability of this conclusion.