French director Justine Triet is back in the Cannes competition with a cerebral smash that might finally bring the Best Actress award that its star, Sandra Hüller, was cruelly denied in 2016. Hüller’s screen magnetism cannot be denied, and she has this Cannes in the palm of her hand. Whether she will also get a Palme in her hand is up to the jury.
Triet’s film, Anatomy of a Fall, is a ferociously intelligent and deceptively playful drama that uses genre as a Trojan horse through which to tell the story of a normal family’s sudden implosion. The setting is a chalet in the snowy French Alps, where Sandra, a well-known German writer, lives with her French husband Samuel.
Were this a simple whodunit, Triet’s film would be just as enjoyable, but the director’s masterstroke is to subvert the pleasures of genre convention to explore issues of schadenfreude and plain morbid human curiosity. Cross-examined in court by a super-sharp-minded prosecutor, Sandra finds all her dirty laundry being aired. The trial plays out almost like a script meeting, fleshing out plot points and motivations, deconstructing its twists and turns while we’re actually watching them unfold.
At its heart is Hüller’s performance, a haunting and emotional tour de force that stays long in the mind and puts her right up there in the top tier of European talent. Don’t miss Anatomy of a Fall, a film that is both satisfying and brilliantly unsatisfying in a subtle and slyly Hitchcockian way.
