"We must celebrate change when it happens: this year seven female directors are competing": with these few words, pronounced before awarding the Palme d'Or, Jane Fonda did not think she was saying so well. A few minutes later, it was to Justine Triet that she presented the supreme award of the 76th Cannes Film Festival for her film Anatomy of a Fall, making her the second French director to win it, after Julia Ducournau for Titane in 2021.
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Mistress of his story
Anatomy of a Fall tells the story of a writer, Sandra (Sandra Hüller, also starring in Jonathan Glazer's Grand Prize-winning The Zone of Interest), accused of murdering her husband. During her trial, it is the whole story of her couple, its unspoken, its secrets and its resentments, that she must expose before a jury, lawyers and a hearing in which her son, a visually impaired teenager, finds himself. Cornered, Sandra is dispossessed of a narrative, and a point of view, that she used to master in her life as in her novels. And sees herself subjected to divergent looks, which see her as a selfish woman, or fiercely independent.
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In pictures
View slideshow27 photos
View slideshow27 photos
Punch speech
Justine Triet had already presented films on the Croisette: Victoria (with Virginie Efira and Vincent Lacoste) in 2016 and Sibyl (again with Efira, but also Adèle Exarchopoulos), in competition in 2019. On stage, she wanted to bring up her producers and actors, including Sandra Hüller, Milo Machado Graner and Antoine Reinartz. She first thanked her co-writer and companion, Arthur Harari, also a filmmaker (Black Diamond, Onoda, 10000,<> Nights in the Jungle), "who was kidnapped for three years". Before launching into a vibrant speech on the "powerful, unanimous protest against the pension reform that has shaken the country this year".
Justine Triet denounced a "domineering power scheme, more and more uninhibited" that erupts "in all spheres of society and cinema is no exception", believing that "the commodification of culture is breaking the cultural exception without which (it) would not be there today". Before evoking this place that she herself took a few years ago "in a world one that considered it possible to make mistakes, and to start again". Proof, as Jane Fonda said, that times have indeed changed, but in sometimes contradictory directions. The victory of Justine Triet is perhaps, in this sense, a hope.
