Anatomy of a Fall comes with enough praise to make its shortcomings harder to ignore. It is a French film, and at two and a half hours it is not dull, exactly, but it is monotonous. The story begins as a mystery and ends without resolving it, so the experience is less like watching a case being solved than like being invited to solve one and then told the answer does not matter.
The opening scene introduces a writer who is being interviewed at home. Loud music suddenly starts upstairs, and the interview has to stop. My first thought was: why doesn't she go upstairs and ask her husband to turn it off? She simply lets it continue. That small moment bothered me more than it probably should have, because it made her passivity feel like a clue or a cover.
Then her husband falls to his death. I assumed I was watching a suspense film that would build toward a revelation. It doesn't. By the end, no killer has been identified, and it is still unclear whether the husband jumped, fell, or was pushed. The trial is the film's center, but the trial never turns into the kind of airtight reconstruction I expected.
During the trial, the wife is treated as a suspect, and the film gradually reveals her life. She is estranged from her parents. She prefers the city and moved to a remote place to accommodate her husband. She is not involved in her son's daily life or schooling. She is bisexual and has had an affair. She treats her husband's sacrifices as if they were owed to her, and she describes his failure as something he deserved. She says she loves him, but she does not seem to care about him.
I think she killed him. The film does not prove it, but several details point that way for me.
- Her novel contains a scenario that resembles the death.
- Her relationship with her husband is bad, and they argue often.
- She conceals things during the case. There is a bruise on her arm. She says they have not argued in a long time. She claims she slept through the loud music, yet when her son finds the body and calls out, she hears him quickly.
- There are clear drag marks in the blood on the snow, which does not fit a simple suicide.
- Her son lies to protect her. At first he gives the wrong location, and later he provides the key account of a conversation about his father's suicidal tendencies. I think that conversation is invented.
Maybe the film wants us to live with uncertainty, and maybe that ambiguity is meant to be the point. For me, though, it does not feel profound. It feels like a refusal to finish the case. A film can leave questions open, but it has to earn the openness. Anatomy of a Fall kept me watching, yet when it was over I felt I had been given a long setup and no payoff.