“You see some films, and they’re interesting,” says the French director Justine Triet, “and then there are others that affect you in a very violent way.” It’s fair to say that Triet’s latest film, Anatomy of a Fall, has affected viewers, and her own life, intensely. In May, she went from being simply a well-respected rising auteur to a Cannes Palme d’Or winner – and a figure of national controversy.
Anatomy of a Fall has scored more than a million admissions at the French box office. The film has galvanised audiences with its depiction of the conjugal stresses between a woman and a man, both fiction writers; the drama centres on the courtroom inquiry after the man falls to his death from a window of their home.
“I couldn’t have anticipated the response,” says Triet, 45, speaking in French on Zoom. Vaguely resembling Amy Adams in big 80s-style glasses, she talks fast and with an intensity that suggests a Sorbonne academic rushing to make an intervention at a high-pressure convention. “What amazed me was how people would come up and talk to me about themselves. They’d say, ‘That’s my life, I’ve been through that,’ or ‘I’m going through it right now.’”
Courtroom dramas are notoriously prone to be stiff and stagey, but Triet set out to remake the genre. “I wanted to do something très homemade,” she says, slipping into English, “and very French. I wanted to dive deep into the question of the couple, but through the perspective of the justice system.” The hearing in Anatomy unpicks the domestic arrangements of writer Sandra (the extraordinary German actor Sandra Hüller, of Toni Erdmann fame), her husband (Samuel Theis), and their precociously insightful 11-year-old son (compelling newcomer Milo Machado Graner). The drama becomes an inquiry into gender roles and the demands of the creative life, with Sandra manifestly on trial as a woman, a mother and a partner, as much as a murder suspect.
Triet’s lead characters – notably in her 2016 comedy In Bed With Victoria and its psychodrama follow-up Sibyl – have been intellectually complex women who make no bones about their powerful sexuality. In Anatomy, Sandra’s bisexuality becomes a key piece of evidence in court. “When they can’t find enough evidence against her, they look at her lifestyle. They end up dissecting her as someone who’s not afraid to act, let’s say, egotistically, as they see it.”
Triet is only the third female film-maker to win the Palme d’Or, after Jane Campion for The Piano and France’s Julia Ducournau for Titane. J is the key letter, Triet jokes: “Jane, Julia and me – and Jane Fonda, who presented me with my Palme.” But in a sense, like her protagonist, Triet found herself on trial after her win. In her acceptance speech at Cannes, she took the opportunity to support protests against the Macron regime and to criticise the French government for a “commercialisation of culture” that threatened its continued support of national cinema. France’s minister of culture, Rima Abdul Malak, responded in a furious tweet that she was “flabbergasted” by Triet’s comments, and subsequently called her “ungracious and ungrateful”, given the director’s own access to state funding. Others piled on Triet, including the mayor of Cannes, who called her a “spoiled child”.
Triet doesn’t regret speaking out. “I’m quite shy, and when you’re shy and you speak up, you have to do it forcefully. I stand behind my words. I’ve been able to succeed thanks to a system of film finance that’s the envy of the world. I wanted to say, let’s protect that and think of future film-making generations.”
More recently, some have speculated that Triet has been punished for her forthrightness, as Anatomy has been passed over as France’s entry for the Academy Awards in favour of the more traditional (but still mightily impressive) The Taste of Things, (aka The Pot-au-Feu), by Vietnamese-born director Tran Anh Hung. Triet shrugs. “I’m not on the committee, I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to spit on the film they selected, I admire Tran Anh Hung, but it was a huge disappointment.”
Even so, on her Instagram feed, Triet reposted someone’s criticism of the Oscars decision. “I hadn’t read the post before I shared it,” she said, with what sounds like an embarrassed laugh. But she adds, “I had nearly 6,000 messages in two days. The number of people in France and abroad who said it was an injustice … ”
* * *
Such comments may not be accepted awards-season etiquette, especially from a Palme d’Or laureate. But for years, Triet was a marginal figure in French cinema – a struggling documentarist before she turned to fiction. When she started out, she says, “I didn’t feel that French cinema particularly wanted me around, I felt all the places were already taken.”
She grew up in Paris, one of three children, and spent much of her childhood in a Buddhist community. “There would often be two, three hundred people around, from all over Europe. It was a very unusual upbringing, and very enriching.”
Triet originally wanted to be a painter, and enrolled in Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts while working as a theatre usher. Then she discovered documentary: the great French and American practitioners like Frederick Wiseman, Jean Rouch, Shirley Clarke. She studied editing and taught herself the rudiments of film-making, starting off by buying herself a microphone, because someone told her, “It doesn’t matter how rubbish your pictures are, but you need to have good sound.”
She began making documentaries on political themes, including labour protest and a social centre in São Paulo. That practice fed into her fiction debut La Bataille de Solférino (Age of Panic, 2013), a comedy about a journalist juggling her work and home life; set against the 2012 presidential elections, it used documentary footage that Triet shot on the sly. Her next two films, both starring French box-office regular Virginie Efira, were very different. In Bed With Victoria was a sleek, lifestyley sex comedy; Sibyl a hothouse comedy-melodrama about a psychotherapist who gets too close to a patient’s private life.
Both Sibyl and Anatomy were co-written with Triet’s partner, Arthur Harari, himself a highly praised director who also plays bit parts in her films. They live in Paris with their two daughters. Triet denies that the domestic agonies in Anatomy in any way depict her own home life: “We’re not so self-obsessed as to think it’s about us.” I mention that Vanity Fair recently profiled her and Harari as French cinema’s new “power couple”, and she all but shrieks.
“Aaargh, I hate that idea! The whole idea of the couple is something I can’t stand. I don’t think it’s natural to live as a couple, I’m constantly reinventing the way I live. The whole idea of being with some guy, living together, having children … We’re not into this whole successful story thing,” she adds, and slips into English again: “What a nightmare!” In any case, she says, she and Harari don’t plan to write together again.
While Anatomy of a Fall is certainly a film to be reckoned with, it’s not that easy to get a handle on just what kind of director Triet is; her films are so completely different, notwithstanding their consistent feminist themes. Anatomy star Sandra Hüller, who also appeared in Sibyl, says of Triet: “Her intelligence is overwhelming.” But since their last collaboration, Hüller says, “She’s let go more. She’s more interested in things that happen without planning. The direction she’d give most often was, ‘It’s too perfect – make it more chaotic.’”
Like Anatomy’s heroine, Triet seems destined to perplex those around her – certainly critics inclined to try to pin her down. There is one principle she follows, however. “I like what François Truffaut said: ‘Always make each film against your last one.’ It doesn’t mean you don’t like the last one – it’s just about discovering something different.”
Anatomy of a Fall opens in UK cinemas on 10 November
