A marriage between two creatives (the wife with a thriving writing career as a novelist, the husband struggling as a part-time teacher and full-time caregiver) is on the skids in the French Alps.
A fall from an attic window suspected to be more than just an accident takes the husband’s life.
The eleven-year-old son, partially blind, may have been the only witness to events that precipitated the event. His knowing guide dog, anticipating every move, is his only comfort.
A mildly exasperated French judicial system where everything is an intimately combative conversation coldly lays waste to the family.
The psychological and emotional conflicts combined with the fascinating minutia of the investigation and trial in Justine Triet’s superbly and quietly thrilling Anatomy of a Fall make for probing, nuanced entertainment. The performances. The tiny details. The way fiction writers create their realities. The unknowing audience as we are lead deeper and deeper into the thorny relationships. The film is as compelling for what it doesn’t show us as much as it is for what it does. Like the son, we are partially blind.
Ultimately the son must decide how he wants to define his parents and his relationship to them. Every child makes this decision at some point in their life. Not every child is forced to do it in the context of a murder trial where one parent is accused of killing the other. We never quite know the full truth. But the son, like his parents before him, makes his own, as a means of survival. He’ll make a great writer one day.
Anatomy of a Fall is currently available streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
The Schleicher Spin 