Anatomy Of A Fall (2023)

This is such an unusual film. It takes place in the French Alps, and while we do not see much of the relationship, we hear quite a lot about it as the film unfolds. It opens with Sandra in the midst of an interview about her life as a famous author. As the interview goes on and gets a bit flirtatious, loud music begins to pump from upstairs. It’s her husband Samuel, playing an instrumental version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” On repeat. And it gets louder and louder. He’s aggressively trying to derail the interview, and he succeeds. The interviewer leaves, as does their son Daniel takes the dog Snoop for a long walk. When he returns, he finds Samuel in the snow, a bloody wound in his head. Did he fall from the attic in which he was working? Did he jump? Or was he pushed? The film goes through the investigation into what happened, which reveals a lot of detail about the couple’s marriage. So it starts with a traditional mystery but becomes an analysis of a different kind of fall than the literal one at its center. It’s about the decline of a partnership and how often these marital falls can happen in slow-motion, over years of resentments and betrayals. At its center is Sandra who finds herself in the middle of a nightmare when a French court indicts her for the murder of her husband. The court room drama is intense, entirely foreign to an American audience—there is a lot of supposition and hypothesis rather than entirely fact based prosecution. The Napoleonic Code introduced the assumption that any suspect was innocent until proven guilty, but the ways to be proven guilty are quite different than an American court room drama. And all through it, their son hears it all. This is intense and impressive movie, one of the Oscar nominees not to miss.