This year’s Palme D’Or-winning “Anatomy of a Fall” has an ingenious idea, dramatizing a court case that serves as a diagnostic of a marriage. In other words, director Justine Triet fashions a film that proffers character development through procedural. It’s initially exhilarating to be spared the expository table-setting of a typical movie and immediately jump in as fleeting details lock into place. But the film also locks into an anal-retentive holding pattern. “Anatomy of a Fall” seems primed to shift, from a long and winding episode of “Law and Order” into Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” but that transformation never quite occurs. The fascination of the thing leaks away as the court case drones onward.
Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is a novelist of some renown, though not enough to be spared money problems—a detail that writers will appreciate. She is married to Samuel (Samuel Theis), an aspiring writer who, it is gradually shown, resents Sandra for living the life he wants. There are many other issues, but that’s the big one. We don’t learn this for some time, until in the middle of Sandra’s trial for murdering Samuel, who fell out of the attic of their vast French cabin, smashing his head on something before tumbling to his death in a snowy field. In the beginning, we see Sandra flirting with a female grad student, who’s contentiously interviewing her for an assignment, while Samuel blasts music passively-aggressively. Not long afterward, the fall comes.
Samuel’s head wound suggests that someone hit him with something and maybe pushed him out of the attic, though the evidence is inconclusive. Everything about this movie is inconclusive. Ambiguity, irresolution, a vaguely snide refusal to give the audience the narrative pleasure it craves, these qualities are how you win a Palme, dear. Complicating matters is Sandra and Samuel’s blind son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who may have heard something important, or maybe didn’t. His blindness matters to Sandra and Samuel’s broken and resentment-plagued relationship, but maybe not to the murder mystery. Triet’s co-writer here is her real-life partner, Arthur Harari, and the names of the central couple are the same as those of the actors playing them. We’re meant to wonder if real laundry is being aired, even if these meta suggestions don’t go anywhere.
Running over two-and-a-half hours, “Anatomy of a Fall” spends a bewildering amount of time on the court trial. Such a perversity of emphasis is becoming common in cinema. See how Martin Scorsese promised a tragic historical romantic thriller recently only to devote more than a third of his new film to repeating the same details of homicide over and over and over. If you assume from the outset that Sandra didn’t kill Samuel, that it doesn’t suit Triet’s politics to make her the guilty party, then you’re way ahead of the film and in for a wait as it catches up.
Samuel was a wimp who blamed his mediocrity on Sandra, and by the time their troubles are revealed, a part of you may want her to have killed him. A pitiful dude, a strong woman, a crime that may not be a crime — there’s a soupcon here of “Gone Girl,” both the Gillian Flynn novel and the film that David Fincher made from it. “Anatomy of a Fall” could use Flynn’s humor and Fincher’s formalist sizzle. Say what you will about directors like Fincher and Kubrick who require hundreds of takes to get what they want, but the precision shows. Fincher might’ve elevated this very talky script to the realm of silky, unnerving melodrama, and Flynn might’ve had fun with the clichés that here seem to be just a matter of formula.
The prosecuting attorney, frothing at the mouth to nail Sandra to the wall, is a thin, pompous twerp who resembles a skinhead and embodies several stereotypes about women-hating men. There’s no punchline to the character; he exists to score easy points on sexist piglets. Even Sandra’s attorney, ostensibly a nice guy, has a creepy-adjacent crush on her. Triet is not so fond of her women either. Sandra is self-pleased, chilly, insufferable, and frequently given to lying—and we’re supposed to be rooting for her to clear herself of a case overrun by men who are criticized for sharing her very qualities.
I don’t think Triet cares about priming her audience to root for anyone, as she’s more interested in offering a post-mortem of a relationship embarked upon by two superficial, egocentric people, one more confident and adaptable than the other. Their relationship spirals into disaster, and they end up awaiting judgment by a system occupied by other superficial, egocentric people. Contrary to popular myth, protagonists do not need to be likable. They do need to be interesting, however, and these folks never transcend their pettiness or even offer any new variations of it. They’re a drag.
The film’s cynicism doesn’t emit a charge. We don’t feel like we’re accessing the secret heart of how men and women lie to one another, as we do with Bergman and even with “Gone Girl.” There is an interminable sequence in which Sandra is tried by the prosecution for her writing, a moment that suggests a reaction to the censoriousness of the culture wars, while offering a window into how she spins her personal misery into artistic acclaim. Such a scene should be mind-blowing, but as I was watching, I didn’t care. “Anatomy of a Fall” is a relationship drama disguised as a legal thriller, but the relationship is defined on cold and reductive terms. What we’ve got here is this year’s “Tár,” a movie that sounds blistering in theory while offering in reality something seemingly fashioned by a psych student rather than an artist.
Late in the film, there is a flashback to an argument between Sandra and Samuel that lasts maybe 10 minutes. It is the best scene in the movie, as Triet captures how people in floundering relationships grasp desperately onto their private mythologies. There’s a great detail here too: Sandra is German, and Samuel is French, and they predominantly speak English as a halfway point that’s also a no man’s land, with neither crossing over to the other’s side. This detail matters to the court case too, as Sandra is forced to describe awkward scenes from her life in French, of which she has shaky command, and so she’s even more at the mercy of this alien society than usual.
That said, this scene also underscores what’s missing from “Anatomy of a Fall.” In the flashback, Samuel criticizes Sandra sexually, claiming that she holds back from him in the bedroom. Sandra asks Samuel what it is that he feels that she doesn’t do, and for a moment there’s tension raised by the possibility that a movie might have the daring to mine those most specific and awkward and forbidden elements of people’s lives, those details that help to define us, particularly our anxieties, but which are verboten to discuss in public. But Triet backs down. Samuel gives a vague answer and the scene fritters away to nothing.
Watching “Anatomy of a Fall,” I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’s plumbing the same class and gender tensions as many other legal thrillers, only with an air of self-consciousness that’s far less electrifying than ordinary, less acclaimed movies of its kind. Most critics love it when the mechanics of pop movies are drained of their pleasure, dissected, and held out on the operating table for all to see. I’m of the suspicion that good pop cinema is much harder to pull off than tony art films. Watching “Anatomy of Fall,” I also thought of Alan J. Pakula’s 1990 film “Presumed Innocent,” which concerns a murder mystery that pivots on institutional sexism, long-festering resentment in a marriage, and on simple, demoralizing middle-aged loneliness. It’s a sad and elegant thriller that, if memory serves, we took for granted at the time. It never would’ve gotten a Palme or an Oscar, as it didn’t have the decency to show its work.
A relationship in crisis also figures in the plot of “Suitable Flesh,” which couldn’t be farther from “Anatomy of a Fall” in sensibility. Written by Dennis Paoli, who wrote those great Stuart Gordon adaptations of H.P Lovecraft, such as “Re-Animator,” and directed by Joe Lynch, who found a way to have Salma Hayek gun down goons in her lingerie for most of “Everly,” “Suitable Flesh” puts us back in touch with the breathlessness of soft-core erotica and the splattery violence of 1980s-era horror thrillers. The movie hits the spot, but it’s just promising enough to make you wish it was better: crazier and more stylish and in worse taste.
Lynch captures the fake, heightened, anticipatorily naughty vibe of soft-core erotica. Something about Barbara Crampton and Heather Graham walking around together in white lab coats, neither offering a whiff of creditability as medical professionals, inherently suggests porn. They resemble sisters and have a sly hint of sexual tension that intensifies as the film proceeds. If you find these observations repellent, then be warned: this isn’t your movie. “Suitable Flesh” is for Gen X’ers who grew up on horror movies that weren’t fertilized with a few decades’ worth of male guilt.
The premise involves the occult and body switching, and is like Gordon’s classics derived from Lovecraft. Wisely, Lynch doesn’t try to compete with Gordon, who had along with Romero a virtuoso’s sense of how comedy heightens horror and vice versa. Lynch keeps things loose and cheeky, giving Crampton and Graham plenty of room to play, though he squanders the potential of these women changing sexual personalities and thrusting Jonathan Schaech’s hunky patsy husband into the crossfire. The notion of cheating on your wife with your wife is virtually bottomless in its potential for capturing the weird neuroses and wrinkles of relationships, and Lynch brushes against that potential without quite reaping the harvest.
At just under 90 minutes, “Suitable Flesh” is actually too brisk—a refreshing problem for a modern genre film to have—and so it doesn’t savor the fear and titillation that drive the erotic thriller. (Out of this premise, Brian De Palma might’ve once made a masterpiece.) That said, these sexy, gory hijinks are still invigoratingly outlandish. Lynch didn’t make this movie as part of a campaign for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a zealous fan with talent, and he regards Crampton and Graham as nothing less than icons. He’s a horny gentleman.
“Anatomy of a Fall” is now playing at Movieland. “Suitable Flesh” is now in theaters and available to stream on Shudder.
