“Anatomy of a Fall,” the remarkable new film by the French director Justine Triet, begins with an interview. A woman arrives at a chalet in the French Alps to speak with Sandra Voyter (played by Sandra Hüller), a novelist who lives with her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), and their preteen son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). It’s winter, but the mood indoors is warm; Sandra is relaxed, charming, and slyly evasive. Then, suddenly, the interview ends, as Samuel begins to blast music from upstairs in an apparent act of aggression. Sandra shows the interviewer out, suggesting that they get together soon in Grenoble, but that meeting never takes place. Shortly after she leaves, Samuel is found dead in the snow outside the chalet, having fallen from the attic. Did he jump? Was he pushed? Sandra, at once stunned and curiously composed, is charged with his murder.
What ensues is a drama that takes place in the home, in the courtroom, and in the public eye. Sandra, who is German, is called on to defend herself in a language she doesn’t speak fluently; she and Samuel used English at home, and much of the film takes place in a blend of that language and French. But what, exactly, is Sandra being accused of? Murdering her husband, yes—but also, it seems, neglecting him for her work; flirting with other women; having ambition; being a foreigner, a mother, a writer, an unreadable, unrepentant woman. As the trial wears on, Triet shows us how the legal system’s insistence on clarity ends up distorting the complex, contradictory human picture. Sandra, too, is committed to the truth, the mottled kind that artists know. So is Triet.
“Anatomy of a Fall” premièred at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it won the Palme d’Or. When she took the stage to accept the award, Triet gave a passionate political speech in which she denounced the Macron government’s suppression of the mass protests, held throughout the winter and spring, of a highly unpopular change to the country’s retirement age. She also warned that the French “cultural exception”—essentially, state support for the arts—is under threat. We spoke by Zoom a few weeks ago, while she was in Paris and I was in New York. Our conversation, which took place in a blend of French and English, has been translated, condensed, and edited for clarity.
Your film premièred at Cannes, where it won the Palme d’Or. You’ve been speaking about it for the last five months. I’m wondering how your relationship to it has changed in that time. Is it the same film for you that you showed in May?
It’s an experience that I’ve never had before. I’ve never done so much promotion. I think that, for me, it often takes three or four years after making a film to understand it. And it’s true that, since I’ve been speaking about it a lot, there are moments where I make different connections, or people share certain interpretations that give me access to different parts of the film. It’s really a very special experience.
Are there specific interpretations that come to mind?
There were two funny things. The first is that there have been multiple women who have told me that they sent their ex-boyfriends to the movie and said, “You have to watch this to understand why I split with you.” I thought that was very interesting.
And the fight scene, you know, when I was writing it—I was not worried, but I was, like, O.K., this is the turning point in the movie, after this maybe people won’t love Sandra as much. And it’s the opposite. It was really surprising for me to see the way people felt close to her after that part. More so women, maybe. Women were, like, O.K., after that, I’m with her.
Just to give people some context, the fight scene that you’re referring to, the climax of the film, arrives in the last third of the movie. It’s a flashback sequence where we witness an argument that took place between Sandra and Samuel shortly before Samuel died. Samuel, who is a teacher, complains that he doesn’t have time to work on his own writing because he’s so busy taking care of Daniel, whom he homeschools. He accuses Sandra of not making space for him and his work, but Sandra refuses to apologize, or to agree to that interpretation of their relationship. And, to me, that seemed very unusual—that the woman in the couple would not try to accommodate the feelings of the man. She tells him that he’s responsible for the way he uses his time; it’s up to him to make changes, not her. Is that what people have responded to?
These kinds of questions are both philosophical and practical. The question of how we live with one another is also, in the end, a question about love, because in love nothing is worth more than candor, than honesty. I live with my partner, who makes films. I know that each of us has an ego. But I have to tell him the truth when I think something isn’t right, and he does, too. If he started to lie to me, I’d hate it. And I think that Sandra has so much respect for Samuel that she can’t lie to him.
So I think that she’s someone who has deep integrity in two respects. There’s the fact that she tells the truth, and the fact that she won’t renounce her ambition. And, yes, I think that Samuel plays the victim a bit, because he may be someone who’s sacrificed himself, but he’s also hidden himself, in a way, behind this position of the man who’s been mistreated.
But these people are still trying to speak to one another. For me, there’s still love there. The problem is that in each couple, there’s always a burden to carry, and here, it’s their son’s accident, which has thrown off the balance between them. And that disequilibrium, it’s true, basically benefits Sandra, even if—and this is the irony of the film—Samuel’s death finally allows him to take up the space that she wouldn’t give him before.
I think that the fundamental question of the film is the question of reciprocity in the couple. I think that also, culturally, women have always been at home, and men have gone out into the world and have had the time to think, to reflect, to have ideas. Women didn’t have that time, because they had to take care of domestic tasks. And so the fact of having a female character who’s a creator, who writes books, who is in the position, at last, of taking time to write, means that it’s the man who suffers. That’s why the argument begins with the question of time. I think it’s something universal and fundamental vis à vis the place of men and women in the family. Sorry, the answer is too long!
No, it’s great. And actually, right now, my husband is on the other side of the door feeding our baby. So it’s all connecting.
Oh, my God! There’s a baby over there! It’s very interesting!
You spoke about your partner, Arthur Harari. I know you wrote the film together. I’m curious what that process was like.
I love life as a couple. But it’s also true that it can be quite dull. So I think it’s cool to be able to share creative moments with Arthur; I’ve cast him in some of my previous films. What was interesting was to get him into my territory, to be able to share this. We started a week before COVID hit. I had an eight-month-old baby. Maybe it’s not the same age as your baby.
Nine months, so yeah.
Ah! Wow. Very intense.
Yes.
So that whole period was very intense. But the baby napped a lot, and we took shifts. I think that we had a certain naïveté, because we never said to ourselves that we were making a film about a couple. But the questions of MeToo were inevitably in the mix. None of the people around me could avoid asking questions about their way of living, their way of splitting time.
