To fully understand a marriage you need to be a part of it. And even then it can seem as if the two partners are communicating in entirely different languages. This is literally the case in the marriage of successful German-born author Sandra (a phenomenal Sandra Hüller) and her French husband, aspiring writer Samuel (Samuel Theis), a union that is forensically and microscopically examined in Justine Triet’s gripping, sinuous, Cannes Palme d’Or-winning courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall. Language – Sandra prefers to speak in English even though, at her husband’s behest, they live in France – is just one of the flashpoints for tension between the two.
These tensions might have just simmered on privately and indefinitely, within the walls of the couple’s partially renovated alpine chalet, but for the fact that Samuel is found dead, discovered by the couple’s visually impaired 11-year-old son, Daniel (a terrific, painfully conflicted turn from talented young actor Milo Machado Graner), having fallen from the attic window. An inconclusive inquest into the death can’t rule out the possibility that he was pushed. And so Sandra finds herself on trial, with her child called as one of the key witnesses in the case. The flaws and faultlines in her relationship with Samuel are exposed and picked over by a tenacious prosecution lawyer (Antoine Reinartz) and repackaged as evidence for her guilt.
