When Jane Fonda presented Justine Triet with the Palme d’Or in Cannes earlier this year for her remarkable film Anatomy of a Fall, one of cinema’s best-kept secrets was, just like that, making headlines around the globe.
It wasn’t only for her award. In her acceptance speech, the director railed against Macronism and the suppression of dissent in the wake of France’s controversial pension reforms. “These protests were denied ... repressed in a shocking way,” she said. The “commercialisation of culture this neoliberal government supports is in the process of breaking France’s cultural exception,” she added, referring to the system of state supports without which she “wouldn’t be here today”.
The mayor of Cannes called Triet ungrateful. France’s minister of culture, Rima Abdul Malak, said she was flabbergasted.
The French have now plumped for the pleasing, superficial gastro-porn of The Taste of Things over Triet’s superior feature, a crime procedural, as their entry for the best-international-film category at the Academy Awards.
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The film-maker, whose Palme d’Or win made her the third woman to receive the prize, after Jane Campion and Julia Ducournau, says she’s a fan of Tran Anh Hung, the Vietnamese director of The Taste of Things, but has been taken aback by the kerfuffle around her acceptance speech and the continuing fallout.
“I was not so surprised at the time, because it was natural to speak about what I spoke about,” she says. “But nowadays everything is so commented on. Any time something is on Twitter, it blows up. I made some enemies. But I made many, many more friends after. Many people said thank you so much for speaking about us, for not being selfish, for reaching out to your community.”
Anatomy of a Fall’s protagonist is an irksome, untrustworthy German novelist, Sandra (portrayed with considerable clout by Sandra Hüller), whose French husband, Samuel, resents her success. When he is found dead in the snow beneath the balcony of their Alpine chalet by their visually impaired son, Daniel and his guide dog, Messi, foul play is suspected. Sandra’s quarrelsome marriage and bisexual affairs add fuel to the prosecutor’s fire.
“She embodies something that’s not just elusive but also something that’s maybe slightly perturbing, because she’s not in a classical couple,” Triet says. “She’s not embodying a classical role in any way. And, at the same time, I think she is seen as a threat to everyone. She writes successful novels. She knows how to make fictions. She has the capacity to be duplicitous. I think she’s very interesting because she’s not a good victim. She doesn’t cry enough for everyone. She’s not such a good mother. She’s free in many ways. She’s difficult.”
Triet wrote the part specifically for Hüller, weaving her foreignness into the story: as well as adding to her profound lack of relatability, Sandra’s lack of fluency in French becomes a problem during her trial.
Producers pointed out that Hüller (who also gives a chilly turn in The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s forthcoming Holocaust drama) was not a commercial actor – and, what’s more, was a German who’d be speaking in English in the film – “but once people saw her it was different”, Triet says. “I have written for other actors as well and when you’re inhabited by someone’s presence in terms of writing, and she has something about her, it nourishes the writing of the script. Sandra is opaque; she’s complex; there’s something about her body. I don’t know how to put it. It’s very, very special. Indeed, her body doesn’t belong to her; there’s something very strange. When we turned up on the set in the morning she just depicted the person. It was very mystical in a way.”
Sandra is the latest of Triet’s creations to mine stories from their realities or blur boundaries between fact and fiction. The former documentarian surreptitiously set the drama of her debut narrative feature, Age of Panic, at the headquarters of the French Socialist Party and on the streets of Paris during the country’s presidential election of 2012. In Bed with Victoria sees Virginie Efira’s lawyer in a tailspin when she discovers she is a subject in her husband’s blog. In Sybil, the titular psychotherapist (Efira again) uses her patient’s confessions for a steamy novel. And now, for Anatomy of a Fall, Triet and Arthur Harari, her film-making husband, have written a script about jealous married creatives.
“It’s a trap,” Triet says, laughing. “I do it myself. When I see the real life of the director or writer, I want to see something that connects with the story; people want to believe that. But if I go outside of my home, I can write something about you but I don’t know you. You might inspire me, but it’s complicated. I play with that in the courtroom, because I think it’s a nightmare for us, the way that the court and the lawyer take something and make their own stories. Tomorrow you could take my film and look at it and decide that I’m obsessed with killing men and use it against me.”
Anatomy of a Fall juggles various accounts and, most daringly, suggests that legal argument is just another kind of storytelling. Some of the film’s tensest sequences are about Sandra’s increasingly wary son and his escalating suspicions during her trial. Even Messi – who took home the top Palme Dog award at Cannes – starts to look mistrustful as the hearings continue.
“I was obsessed with finding new ways to film the dog,” Triet says. “It was very interesting. I wanted to film him at his level. He’s a real character in the movie. He sees everything. He’s the eyes of the child. He’s not just a dog.”
Triet’s film bludgeons the turn-of-the-millennium trope known as women-in-refrigerators syndrome, or fridging. She has watched too many films “in which women are killed and chopped up and suffering”. So Anatomy of a Fall doesn’t ask “Did she do it?” Instead it asks “Whose marriage can withstand legal scrutiny?” and “What if she gets away with it regardless?” It’s a complicated and prickly thriller built around a complicated and prickly suspect.
“It’s always the same story since I started,” Triet says. “Because I always heard that: your character is not sympathetic; she is not likable. It’s a long story. I’ve been hearing it for 15 years. Now I can say, okay, it’s my story, and I think people will be excited ... I was very lucky with this script because everyone was thrilled to be doing it with me.”
Anatomy of a Fall is both crime procedural and anti-procedural, a courtroom drama that dismantles courtroom drama – rather like Alfred Hitchcock pointing the camera at a detail no other director would think to bother with or coolly switching protagonists halfway through a film. It’s unsurprising that Triet adores Rope, Hitchcock’s one-shot Nietzschean psychodrama.
“Yes, yes!” Triet says. “I love that movie so much. It is one of my favourite movies from childhood. I was very moved by it. It was the most subversive movie I had seen: two people commit a perfect murder and for nothing. And I love that they have this perfect plan and they are excited. And it all gets fu***d up anyway.”
Anatomy of a Fall has prompted many arguments about whether Sandra is guilty. The director is giving nothing away except to concede that she told Hüller to play the part as if she was innocent. “I am the only person who knows,” Triet says, laughing. “But I can’t say. I’ve never told anyone.”
Anatomy of a Fall opens on Friday, November 10th
