SYNOPSIS
A woman is suspected of her husband's murder, and their son faces a moral dilemma as the main witness.​

Arthur Harari, co-screenwriter of Anatomy of a Fall, has generously agreed to explore for us the deeper layers of the film.

“Anatomie d’une chute, Anatomy of a Fall. Currently nominated for five Oscars, it has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (along with the Palme Dog for its canine performance), plus six César awards including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress; it also won a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and the César for its screenplay, which was co-written by director Justine Triet and her partner Arthur Harari.
The dynamic of a writing couple is written all over the film, as the film is also concerned with a couple, who are also writers. The line between the writing couple and the written couple, however, cannot be reduced to the line between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction,’ since this line not only encircles, but cuts into the film. The joint between life and art is the film’s ‘zone of interest,’ sometimes written small – characters Sandra and Samuel are played by Sandra Hüller and Samuel Theis – and sometimes large – as in the question of whether one character’s works of fiction can be entered as evidence in court.
Fiction demands a departure from life; the law demands life itself. And yet the law, like another character, sees very little – it knows only what it hears. Nearly blind, these characters must instead imagine seeing, must obsessively stage and re-stage events that not even we, the audience, will have seen. We, those who ‘see’ the film, join in the blind perspective of one trying to reconstitute its events, to climb back up (often literally) to the precipitous heights from which the dramatic action begins. The deeply cinematic staging on which the law relies opens it again to fiction, which may go too far – into perjury – or not far enough, insisting too much on gaining a truth too difficult to judge.
Anatomy, or ‘cutting apart,’ may be theoretically infinite, but the film brings us to the limit of how much dissection a life can bear. Anatomy cuts fidelity apart, whether one partner’s fidelity to another or the fidelity of any narrative to the twists and perversions of life. Too much fidelity may prevent the necessary fictionalization that not only cinema, but also legal judgment, appears to need; too much anatomy may render the text illegible. The balance between anatomy and fidelity will decide not only the legal but the moral force of telling a story.
Anatomy of a Fall is a detective story reduced to absolute essentials – one question, two answers – essentials that turn out not to include the question of time. The question, ‘where were you at that time?’ is never asked; one character mentions offhand that ‘time is not a problem.’ But time is thereby left open to non-legal claims, so that another character can say: ‘I want that time back.’
Time becomes an anguish that life is being lived unaccompanied – by a partner, by oneself, by the writing one wants to leave behind. Yet the desire to squeeze in ‘time for writing’ may transform writing’s appearance. In the film, we see nothing written down. Where else might writing happen? – perhaps when a building is built, a decision made, or words put into someone’s mouth. The events of the film, small traces of blood, and numerous audio recordings begin to suggest a writing by which, taking over from the screenwriters, the film begins to write itself.
In the middle of these writing shifts, and of the metamorphosis bewteen ‘art’ and ‘life,’ and of almost everything we hear in the film, is translation. None of the principal characters speaks in his or her native language; layers of translation, for newspapers, in earpieces, leave us groping for an original. Even as translation is a kind of coupling of one word with another – a finding of equivalences – it also relies on cutting this couple apart, cutting away the words and finding the sense they have in common, or the sense that one word takes, even plunders, from the other. Translation does this, what’s more, for every detail of a text, scrupulously, as a judge might.
Something anatomic, then, lies in translation, and this anatomy cuts the couple apart in order to adjudicate the balance of its coupling. In the scales of its justice, the film makes us wonder whether any pair is ever quite balanced; whether one can be substituted for the other; whether love is really equally shared; and whether this slight imbalance can be held responsible in the case of a fall.”

(From the introduction to the film by Simon Horn, graduate student in German Studies)