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Justine Triet, the writer and director behind this year\u2019s Palme d\u2019Or winner, \u201cAnatomy of a Fall,\u201d makes movies about the misadventures of working girls and the double standards faced by mothers who have the audacity to be, well, unmotherly. Triet has directed romcoms, relationship dramas and now, a courtroom whodunit: all magnify the fears and anxieties of women who work and play hard.<\/p>\n
Movies about victims are off the table.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve watched hundreds and hundreds of films in which women are violated, killed, chopped up \u2014 films that say \u2018look at this poor, suffering woman,\u2019\u201d Triet said recently over a drink in Midtown Manhattan. \u201cWhy should I make another one?\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, \u201cAnatomy of a Fall,\u201d the fourth feature by the 45-year-old French filmmaker, places a powerful woman on trial and asks: How does a reversal of gender roles transform the way we perceive guilt and innocence?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Sandra (Sandra H\u00fcller) is an acclaimed novelist and translator; she\u2019s cocky, bisexual and her flinty gaze could scatter a crowd. She\u2019s a German living in a multistory chalet in the French alps with her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their 11-year old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is blind. Samuel is a writer, too \u2014 his career is just not as important.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In the film\u2019s opening sequence, we see Sandra being interviewed by a female graduate student as a steel drum version of 50 Cent\u2019s \u201cP.I.M.P.\u201d plays on deafening repeat. The music \u2014 blasted vengefully by Samuel from an upper room \u2014 cuts Sandra\u2019s flirty discussion short. Tensions are high, so when Daniel finds his father, face up on the snow, dead after a tumble from the top floor window, Sandra becomes the sole suspect.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to show how a woman might come under attack precisely because of her intelligence, ambition and her mental fortitude,\u201d Triet said. Sandra, she added, was \u201cbroken down by a moralistic society that intensely scrutinizes the way women choose to lead their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Triet developed the project with H\u00fcller, a German actress best known for playing a killjoy career-woman in \u201cToni Erdmann,\u201d in mind from the get-go. H\u00fcller\u2019s character \u201ccan come off as cold and hostile, but not in a caricatured femme fatale way,\u201d Triet said. \u201cThat\u2019s just her natural way of being, which communicates both an opacity that makes her seem threatening, and it says \u2018I\u2019m not a perfect mother. I\u2019m human,\u2019\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
H\u00fcller said she played Sandra with the kind of warmth and emotion that doesn\u2019t rely on easily empathetic gestures, like crying and smiling constantly. The character \u201cis a real grown-up person, which is rare,\u201d H\u00fcller said in a recent phone interview. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t apologize for who she is, even if that gets her into trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cAnatomy of a Fall\u201d was co-written by Triet and her husband, the filmmaker Arthur Harari, during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, which the couple spent in isolation with their two children. Harari helped write the screenplay for Triet\u2019s previous film, the punchy psychodrama \u201cSibyl,\u201d but \u201cAnatomy of a Fall\u201d was a true \u201cunion of two brains,\u201d forged intimately behind doors closed, Triet said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In \u201cAnatomy of a Fall,\u201d Sandra and Samuel\u2019s literary rivalry, and their process of culling their own lives for inspiration, is used against Sandra in court. A kind of nesting doll effect is apparent in the parallels between the real and fictional couples \u2014 Triet and Harari, Sandra and Samuel, and the characters in the fictional couple\u2019s books \u2014 but the director said that the artistic spats between husband and wife in the film weren\u2019t autobiographical.<\/p>\n
Triet and Harari treated the feature \u201cas a playground, as well as a nightmare vision of what will never happen to us,\u201d wrote Harari in an email. \u201cJustine is and was more \u201csuccessful\u201d than I am, but I\u2019m very far from Samuel. I probably relate more to Sandra!\u201d<\/p>\n
Triet said she grew up wanting to be a painter. Her parents were enthusiastic moviegoers \u2014her father once worked as a projectionist \u2014 but her desire to make movies came relatively late. In art school, she took video and editing courses that inspired her to switch gears, and immerse herself in the work of documentary pioneers and experimental filmmakers for whom the distinction between fiction and fact was irrelevant: Frederick Wiseman, Shirley Clarke, Allan King, Raymond Depardon.<\/p>\n
Triet began her filmmaking career making chaotically expressionistic documentary shorts about contemporary politics, including one about the 2007 presidential election in France. Eventually, she began to write her own scripts, making her feature debut in 2013 with \u201cThe Age of Panic,\u201d a frenzied farce shot quickly and on a shoestring budget with a blend of professional and nonprofessional actors. The film follows a single mother dealing with an abrasive ex-husband and infantile new boyfriend while on assignment for her job as a cable news reporter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Nowadays, Triet admits she\u2019s somewhat of a control freak when it comes to the writing and editing stages of a film, which marks a departure from her first act\u2019s guerilla-style methods. On set, however, Triet continues to embrace the sense of freedom that defined her early work: \u201cI\u2019d never show up to a shoot and say \u2018I know exactly what I want. Do this, do that, because I\u2019m the director,\u2019\u201d Triet said.<\/p>\n
\u201cA set isn\u2019t dictated by some sacred hierarchy,\u201d she added. \u201cIt\u2019s a space of exploration where one should be very humble. It\u2019s the only the way to create something genuinely new.\u201d<\/p>\n
When \u201cAnatomy of a Fall\u201d won the Palme d\u2019Or, Triet became only the third woman to win the award. The first was Jane Campion for \u201cThe Piano\u201d in 1993; the second, Triet\u2019s countrywoman Julia Ducournau for \u201cTitane\u201d in 2021.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I started making films, \u2018feminism\u2019 wasn\u2019t really considered a serious cinematic subject in France,\u201d Triet said. \u201cBut since then, even my point of view has evolved. I\u2019ve put a lot of time into thinking about what it truly means to be a woman \u2014 to have authority as a woman \u2014 and how we\u2019re treated as monsters for behaving in certain ways that men are usually forgiven for,.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s taken us a while to see that there\u2019s a representation problem,\u201d she added, praising a recent shift in awareness over gender equality in France\u2019s film industry. \u201cThe world changes. If you can\u2019t see that \u2014 oh well. You will have to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n