A woman is suspected of her husband's murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the sole witness.
20 Sep Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
Pairy Maison
The framing here is a courtroom drama, very simple and straightforward. A process that is (mostly) inhuman with a prosecutor we want to hate. We never discover what actually happened, and the craft here is in taking a simple ambiguity — did this woman murder her husband — and enriching it with many ambiguities.
The primary fold is that both parties are writers who map their lives into their art. We encounter that process through many entries, discussions, readings, recordings… Everything is framed as a source for fiction and therefore fictionalised in life.
All narrators are untrusted. We shift among narrators: the woman, the dog, the boy, the father, the lawyer/lover, a therapist, two expert testifiers, even a young student more or less passing through. We are meant to privilege the dog, but I think they failed on that score.
Much attention is given to exploring/understanding a relationship of two creative people who are in a post-passion domestic relationship, which has been challenged and made weaker. The weaknesses have agency. While I like the construction and technique of the film, these emotional dynamics seemed not rooted in real souls. Rather than pulled from the deepest parts of our lives, it seemed pulled from some theatrically expressible set of conventions.
The thing that worked for me was the essentially unFrench footing. We had a flat story that everyone who spoke French carried, and the nuanced story of depth and introspection that only could be carried by English. This inverts the default of French films, amplified by our knowledge that the character and actress is neither French nor American. That worked for me and was very, clever — positioning English as the root of feminine depth.
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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