Two hours of pleadings, ambiguities and clues that say a lot but never enough to decide.
A puzzle for spectators, the excellent
Anatomy of a Fall
revolves around the guilt of Sandra, a novelist suspected of having pushed her husband Samuel from a balcony.
Without establishing certainty.
To discover
TV tonight: our selection of the day
When it was released, the spectators - more than a million and a half in France - were buzzing about nothing but that.
Everyone left the film with their own verdict and was surprised by their neighbor's.
Invited on Sunday by Pierre Lescure, in
“Beau Geste”
, Justine Triet did not escape the question: guilty or innocent?
Also read: Pierre Lescure: “I keep the religion of the viewer”
The opinion of the American public
“How to bias a thousandth time... Pierre I won't be able to answer you today, I won't be able to confess,”
she smiles on a bench in the Saint-Eustache church, where the interview broadcast on France 2 takes place and available for replay.
We would have liked him to insist, but Pierre Lescure pushes on:
“Above all, we don’t care, it’s so much stronger than that.”
In other words, the feature film contains other issues than that of the heroine's guilt.
The director agrees:
“I hope it takes you elsewhere, that it opens other doors.
Even if, obviously, it is at the center of the film and I understand this question.
Justine Triet then specifies that, according to the many spectators she met, the French most often see her as innocent and the Americans as guilty.
And that the Spaniards did not much like this cold German novelist visibly without tenderness for her husband.
A husband who is himself ambiguous because of his resentment and his desire to fight.
The suicide thesis
“Nourishing and preserving ambiguity: it was long and arduous work
,” the director confided earlier.
“I had to maintain empathy towards Sandra and at the same time instill the feeling that she may have killed her partner.”
Before filming, the filmmaker had asked actress Sandra Hüller, with the face of an ideal culprit, to play
“like an innocent”
.
At the end of the film, the son, Daniel, supports the suicide theory.
And thus saves his mother.
But perhaps the truth lies in a gray area.
Some moviegoers imagine that Sandra did not push Samuel from the balcony, but simply pushed him over the edge.
Which would have led him to this end.
Others believe rather that the husband threw himself away, perhaps to rediscover an importance that he felt he had lost... Psychoanalysts, speak out.
Justine Triet's speech at the Golden Globes supports the suicide theory.
After the usual thanks, she returned to the development of
Anatomy of a Fall.
“With Arthur Harari, we spent the pandemic stuck in our apartment (...) I remember we said to each other: “We're having a lot of fun, but it's radical and dark, no one will go see this film
,” she said
.
It's too long, they talk all the time, there's no music, there are arguments, a suicide, a dog vomiting..."