‘Anatomy Of A Fall’ A Great Film With A Career Best For Sandra Huller

Watching Sandra Huller, the main character at the heart of Anatomy of a Fall, makes me more upset that Emma Stone beat her and Lily Gladstone out for an Oscar, which is her second, for such a lackluster performance in Poor Things. You can’t compared Huller’s Sandra Voyter to Stone’s Bella Baxter. I think the Academy Awards are just afraid of recognizing good actresses in great roles. They’ve always had a problem in the Lead Actress category. Just ask Glenn Close.

Sandra is a German novelist who lives in an isolated mountain chalet near Grenoble, France with her family. It’s funny how France and Germany are divided by an invisible line but there seems to be more distance between the two countries even though together they’re half the size of Texas or less. I’ve heard they’re parts of Italian near the German border where the culture is more German than Italian. But bad history and relations have caused tensions among the countries that are either passive-aggressive or straight-up discriminatory. Sandra is trying to be interviewed by a university student but her husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) disrupts the interview by loudly playing 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” in the attic.

The student leaves. Sandra goes to lie down and take a nap. Their son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), who is visibly impaired takes his guide dog, Snoop (Messi), out for a walk in the snow-covered area. When he returns, he discovers that Daniel has died from an apparent fall out of the attic open window. But the questions begin to arise on what really happened and people begin to question and suspect Sandra.

The marriage between Sandra and Daniel wasn’t the best and she had had previous extramarital affairs with other women. There’s even suspicion she was flirting with the student who’s a young woman. Sandra’s friend and lawyer, Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud), comes to her defense criticizing the investigators who seem to want to conclude Sandra took the opportunity of her son taking a walk to push Daniel out of the attic. Daniel says he never heard his parents arguing over the music but they even still suggest it made the alleged argument too loud for him to even hear when he was the outside.

The police seem to want to target Sandra because she’s a German. It’s France and her husband was French, but she’s still a German, a foreigner. But it becomes more apparent that Samuel wasn’t taking his antidepressants and had tried to overdose on aspirin months earlier. Did Samuel commit suicide or was it just an accident?

While the movie seems to become just another legal drama, director Justine Triet, who co-wrote it with Arthur Harari, keep it from becoming the run of the mill procedural. This is more of a family drama as all the dirty secrets of their marriage come to light. It’s obvious from the start of the movie, this is a rocky marriage. You can almost sense that even if Samuel didn’t die, they would’ve been separated very soon. What’s also apparent from Huller’s performance is that she didn’t push Samuel out of the window. However, there’s an ambiguity over whether he fell or intentionally meant to kill himself.

Samuel was a university lecturer who took time off. But it’s apparent there’s some jealousy and even animosity of Sandra where he has accused her of plagiarism. A recording of fight between the two is played in court and it slowly escalates between a simple conversation to something a lot worse. It’s obvious Samuel was abusive, physically, emotionally and verbally. The “Fall” in the title also refers to their marriage and how their relationship and how bad it ended up. I’d argue this is more like Kramer vs. Kramer in the legal sense.

This is about a family that fell apart over a series of issues including an accident that left Daniel with his vision problem. Maybe it was just too much for either spouse to bare. It’s no surprise that it is mostly set in the snow-covered French landscape as all the problems seemed to snowball. Also, the remoteness itself can lead to tension. And coming as it does not too long after the Covid-19 lockdown, it shows that maybe some people just can’t live together for a long time. I remember hearing by February of 2021, not even a full year after the lockdown, most married couples spent more time together in 11 months than most on average spend together in a decade. When asked years ago why she isn’t married, Whoopi Goldberg quipped, “I don’t want somebody living in my house.”

They say you don’t know what someone is like until you live with them. And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we as a human species aren’t really meant to live with other people especially in isolated places. In college, I saw friends who lived as roommates come close to physical altercations. More men and woman in their 30s, 40s and 50s now are happier being single than they are being in relationships. Why? Because when you’re in a serious relationship, the next step is living together. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sandra may have committed infidelity but from what we see about Samuel, he didn’t give her any reasons not to.

It’s almost funny that during the trial proceedings we hear from people analyzing Samuel and Sandra yet they never met them. We don’t ever know what happens in a marriage. The saddest part is we’re always passing judgment based on how we think things should be, not how they really are. Anatomy won the Palme d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe for the Best Non-English Movie, even though the movie is in both French and English.

I went into this with only a vague knowledge of the plot. And I’ve never heard of Huller but if this role doesn’t open a lot of opportunities for her, there is no justice. Hopefully, she will get that Oscar. I give the filmmakers a lot of credit for giving Snoop more to do than just be another dog that has to die in a movie.

What do you think? Please comment.