2025 Screen/Society French Film Festival: 'Anatomy of a Fall'

On Jan. 30, Screen/Society kicked off their 2025 French Film Festival with “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning 2023 courtroom thriller. The film was introduced by Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, Associate Professor of Romance Studies, who talked about her love of all the films selected for the two-and-a-half week festival and her work ensuring multiple female-directed films would be shown.

At the end of the film, there was a Q&A with Professor Anne-Gaëlle Saliot and Barbara Halla, a Ph.D. student in Romance Studies at Duke. The conversation ranged from technical aspects of the film’s creation to the ethical dilemmas posed in the film, with the audience both invested and eager to participate.

As for the film itself, it covered several of Triet’s recurring themes. Triet’s films often focused on overwhelmed and high achieving women, who share at least part of their name with the actress portraying them. In “Anatomy of a Fall,” our main character, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), is a stressed and isolated novelist born in Germany but now living in France. Hüller. One day, her partially-blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), comes home to find her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) dead from a fall out of the window on their chalet’s top floor. Sandra is considered the main suspect in this potential murder, and the rest of the film follows her in court as she defends herself to the law, her son and old friend and lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud).

The film specializes in making the audience uncomfortable, starting in the first scene, where Samuel plays music so loud that Sandra has to end a home-based interview. The instrumental version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” is so loud it makes the characters and audience uncomfortable. The way the film chooses to zoom in on rather than track characters to get closer to them during courthouse scenes is unsettling and out of the ordinary, and emphasizes the additional scrutiny Sandra faces in the courtroom compared to in her home. The shots are consistently crisp and consistent in color palette, with strong whites, reds, blues and greens being repeated regularly for backgrounds, clothing items and furniture. This visual consistency starkly contrasts with the story of the film, where constant twists, turns and changed testimonies create a very messy plot.

Beyond using zoom instead of tracking shots, the camera work throughout the film also has a distinct purpose of manipulating the viewer’s closeness to the characters. Shots of the courtroom tend to be still, centered and balanced, reminding the viewer of their position as an outsider in this world, while shots at Sandra’s home are more dynamic and occasionally even handheld, creating the impression that the viewer is their own character within this world. This feeling is emphasized even further through the minimal use of non-diegetic sound, so the viewer really only hears what the characters themselves are hearing.

One facet in which the film succeeds so strongly is viewer engagement. The viewer can choose to engage with the film on a number of levels - it can be thoroughly enjoyed as a simple thriller, focusing solely on the “did she do it” aspect of the movie. At the same time though, the movie can be treated as a foray into the deep themes of justice, truth and whether the two are codependent. In spite of the film’s length, Triet manages to capture the viewer’s attention and hold it, despite “Anatomy of a Fall” being both a foreign language film and quite intricate, the sort of film “The New Yorker” writes a review about.

The scene that stuck with me the most was not the well-known argument flashback between Sandra and Samuel. Instead, it was a conversation between Daniel and Marge (Jehnny Beth), the court monitor sent to watch over him. Daniel has been struggling with his own involvement in the case and how to testify, and Marge provides him with the guidance: “to overcome doubt, sometimes we have to decide to sway one way rather than the other. Since you need to believe one thing but have two choices, you must choose.” I think that throughout her film, Triet tries to pose a third option to the audience: being unsure, not picking a side. 

In the end, Messi, the dog actor, received a collective chuckle when he was the first cast name in the credits. “Anatomy of a Fall” was a very successful film, not only on its own, but also as an opening to this year’s French Film Festival, which will hopefully continue to have great attendance and memorable moments.