Anatomy of a Fall: Seeing and Believing

The trial and Triet’s film orbit the same question: Who is Sandra Voyter, really? As her lawyer, Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud), says, she is charged with Samuel’s murder because she’s “his wife,” the natural suspect. But it is her questionable performance in that role that makes suspicion stick. Sandra stands accused of killing her husband, yes, but also, it seems, of neglecting him for her work; of flirting, and sometimes sleeping, with other people; of being a foreigner, a mother, and, above all, a writer, a master of narrative control. The prosecution pounces on Sandra’s professional success. Samuel also longed to write but had never been able to finish a book; he earned his living as a teacher and homeschooled their son part-time. In other words, she was the “husband,” and he the “wife”; didn’t that lead to tension? Consider that the song that Samuel played to interrupt her interview with the student was 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.,” a provocative declaration of male dominance, the prosecutor suggests, chosen to rile Sandra up. (He neglects to mention that Samuel put on an instrumental cover of the song, with bright, happy steel drums in place of the rapper’s verbal swagger.) In this version of events, Sandra grew enraged and snapped—the domineering woman, pushed to the brink.

If the prosecution’s strategy is to defame the character of the surviving wife, the defense’s is to disparage that of the missing husband. Samuel was humiliated by his creative failure, Vincent tells the court. He despaired, gave up, and chose suicide. The theory seems as plausible as any other—certainly it seems Sandra’s best shot at exoneration—but she rejects it. “That wasn’t Samuel,” Sandra says to Vincent, in full hearing of judge and jury. The trial must end in a judgment, but that’s not the same thing as the truth. Sandra cares about the difference, and Triet wants us to care about it too.

From the start of her career, Triet has been interested in capturing driven, high-achieving women as their lives slip beyond their control. Her first feature, Age of Panic, released in 2013, centers on Laetitia (Laetitia Dosch), a Parisian TV news reporter who is assigned to cover the 2012 presidential-election returns and spends the day trying to dodge her deadbeat ex-husband, who follows her, criticizing and complaining, as she struggles to report from the field. The eponymous protagonist of Victoria (2016), played by Virginie Efira, is a lawyer whose career starts to spiral when she agrees to represent a male friend accused by his girlfriend of assault. Sibyl, of Sibyl (2019), also played by Efira, is a psychotherapist and writer who becomes dangerously enmeshed in the tumultuous life of a young female patient. These films deal with serious matters, but they all temper drama with comedy; even when bad things are happening, humor is never far away. Laetitia and Victoria, in particular, are lovable messes. Look at them running around their cluttered apartments half-naked, stepping over the detritus of domestic life as they struggle to zip themselves into short, tight dresses, those costumes of high femininity, so that they can get out of the house and into the world, where they long to be.

In a sense, Sandra is the latest in Triet’s line of heroines; it’s hard to imagine a greater loss of control than standing trial for murder. But the character, and the film itself, represent a major departure for her too. To begin with, there is no comedy, no moment of levity or goofiness to temper the utter seriousness of the proceedings. Despite what the prosecution might suggest, Sandra isn’t a seductress or a slick charmer. She is blunt, direct, truthful to a fault—or else a brilliant dissembler, using the appearance of scrupulous honesty to deceive.

Then there’s the motif of motherhood. Each of the women in Triet’s first three features has two young daughters. (They are even played by the same two actors, one of them Triet’s own daughter.) As characters in their own right, these children are incidental; they serve mainly as emblems of inescapable female burden. A favorite Triet trope is the visit from the self-pitying absentee father who blows in bearing gifts for the kids, staying long enough to gripe about his ex’s parenting before skipping off again into his own unencumbered life. With Sandra and Samuel, this domestic dynamic is inverted. It is Samuel who occupies the squeezed position that Triet’s earlier women know so well, struggling to balance his own ambitions with the demands of the family, and it is Sandra who denies the necessity of that choice.

So much of the film is Sandra’s word against that of a ghost, but in one extraordinary scene Triet lets Samuel speak for himself. A little more than halfway into the film, we are shown a flashback of a fight that took place between the couple on the day before Samuel died. They are in their kitchen, eating a meal that Samuel, naturally, has cooked. The subject of contention is time. Samuel wants Sandra to give him more of it so that he can write. “I’ve been following your lead for years,” he tells his wife. Now he wants her to follow his.

Triet told me that she thought that Sandra might lose the audience’s sympathy after the fight scene. For female viewers, though, the opposite proved to be the case. “It was really surprising for me to see the way people felt close to her after that part,” she said. “Women were, like, Okay, after that, I’m with her.” Here was a woman who refused to soothe a man’s bruised ego for the sake of keeping the peace, who wouldn’t be bullied into discounting her own point of view.

And yet what might be seen as triumphant in one light could look rigid, even cruel, in another. During their argument, Samuel accuses Sandra of “plundering”—a wonderfully dramatic word, so much more evocative than the simpler stealing—in her work. He’s not wrong. Triet’s film Victoria also features a writer of autofiction, one who is made out to be a villain, a cheap thief of other people’s experiences. (It should be said that he is male; the plundering that he does is from his ex-wife.) Her character Sibyl is a magpie kind of writer, too, secretly recording sessions with her troubled patient with the intention of putting the material into a novel. Is Sandra of a piece with these characters, who treat the precious matter of other people’s lives as so much fodder for their own work? (And could the same be said of Samuel, who, like Sibyl, was secretly recording Sandra during their argument?) Or is she a powerful artist, refusing to trade creative freedom for comfort? What is revelatory about Hüller’s performance is that it can accommodate both interpretations. Sandra is not the villain the prosecutor would make her out to be, but she’s no victim either. She wants simply to be understood as she is, no better, no worse, and Hüller takes the same approach to portraying her. You could watch the film ten times and never see quite the same woman twice.

The question of how we live together applies to parents and children too. Samuel’s death thrusts Sandra and Daniel together, their trio terribly reduced to a pair. Daniel is yet another new frontier for Triet, a fully realized child character, though his trouble seeing has a touch of the symbolic, especially in the courtroom, where justice is said to be blind. Day after day, he listens as his mother and father are each shown in the worst possible light, and tries to match these fallible people with the ones he thought he knew. Anatomy of a Fall is a study of a woman and womanhood, but it is also an examination of what it means to grow up. At some point, we all must leave behind the stories we learned as children and, like artists, tell new ones for ourselves.