This one is going to be spoilerrific.
Subtitle: A boy needs his mother.
There is so much to enjoy about this … well I was going to call it a crime film but the central unsolved mystery of the movie is whether a crime was or was not committed.
The movie opens with two women talking and then we hear music played at an impressively obnoxious level. Sandra’s husband apparently is a heel.
No matter, a few moments later and with no witnesses he will take an impressive header out of the top level. He’ll be dead and his wife (played by Sandra Huller) will be the prime suspect.
The only thing approaching a witness is the couple’s blind son and his dog.
There are a dozen different ways to handle such material. Sandra could be a femme fatale, there could be a grizzled detective, or you could do it as a farce or a black comedy.
Director/Writer Justine Triet joined by writer Arthur Harari mostly plays it straight.
Or realistic?
Maybe I just mean it avoids the rainy emotional cliches. No detectives under street lights and very little emotional histrionics.
What we get instead is what I often found when I covered murder investigations and trials while working as a reporter. A group of people doing their jobs.
Whatever emotions they might have about the thing long since whittled away and replaced with a sense of obligation and service. This is just work.
Now, prosecutors, defense attorneys and detectives all have egos and they want to win. Watch the prosecutor (avocat general) played by Antoine Reinartz and you see a man who’s pride is on the line.
Are the facts important? Sure but the prosecutor, like any good lawyer, uses the facts as just part of the story he’s telling.
Sean Arlaud is a handsome, swashbuckling defense attorney but he’s still (mostly) strictly professional. There was apparently a scene where Arlaud romanced his clieng but that was wisely cut out.
The realism extends to conversations Arlaud has with Huller that were word for word what I have heard relayed by defense attorneys.
Huller gives Arlaud an explanation about how her husband fell out of the window. Perhaps she knows it’s a lie, perhaps she is lying to herself.
Either way Arlaud bloodlessly deals with the situation.
“The jury will not believe that. … I do not believe that.”
In other words, if even I, your lawyer, won’t believe this story you must stop saying it.
And so she does.
The movie works through the investigation and the case methodically. It dispenses with emotions for much of it’s run time and then grabs the viewer with a riveting, tension filled fight between the victim and his wife the day before his death.
It’s a perfect scene delivered at just the right moment to propel the movie toward the finish line.
We must also give credit to 15-year-old Milo Graner who is tasked with playing a boy who must grieve for his father while suspecting his mother of murder. Then he must realistically be the witness upon which the entire case turns late in the movie.
And he must do it all while playing a blind child.
A ridiculously high bar that he gracefully vaulted.
It probably helped my enjoyment of this movie that I am not at all familiar with the French judicial process. Apparently, everyone just questions the defendant during the trial and everyone is allowed to give little speeches about the case.
Even if that’s not true it mostly passed muster as an enjoyable fiction.
There was one false note for me and it was the prosecutor being allowed to prowl around the courtroom. The defense never moves but the prosecutor is constantly asking questions from various places.
At one point I laughed (surely not the directors intention) because the prosecutor was asking questions directly behind the witness.
Why would he be there? I’m certain it was because the shot looked cool.
The movie also loses points with me because passages the defendant wrote in her novels become of interest during the proceedings.
Unlikely and cliched.
And you will either find the ending satisfying or you won’t.
We get the outcome of the trial but not an answer to the murder.
The character knows if she did it or not but at the end of the day she is the only one who knows. Murder is like that sometimes. We have evidence, we have suspiciouns and we may even get a conviction but first there must be a leap of faith into — not what is true but rather — what is most plausible.
Regardless, Anatomy of a Fall is riveting and I’m currently running around telling everyone I know to watch it.
It made me flashback to one particular case I covered. A young man was accused of beating his girlfriend’s little boy to death.
The man had an IQ somewhere just above mental disability and when the cops showed up he gave them a story and even reenacted it for them.
He said he had dropped the baby on some stairs as he was walking into a trailer. So the cops handed him a doll and had him reenact it for them while they videotaped his actions.
And then, in a silent courtroom we all watched him walk up those steps and then toss the doll off his shoulders like a sack of trash.
I gasped. Loud.
I was mortified at myself but my brain just reacted.
“He dropped that baby!”
Our suspect in the real world eventually had a good lawyer who pointed the jury towards a key piece of evidence that suggested it was the girlfriend who abused and killed her child.
But by then it didn’t matter. Without a lawyer the man had told two or three stories about the baby’s death.
His lawyer said he confessed because he loved his girlfriend and was willing to go to prison forever for her.
But it was a story the jury just wouldn’t believe.
Dark Highways 