How the conceit of "Anatomy of a Fall" works

Oscars series pt. 4

This fourth installment in my Oscars series and it very much CONTAINS SPOILERS. If you like it, please check out the other installments in the series and remember to like and subscribe :)

In Albert Camus’s classic existentialist novel, “The Stranger,” we see the protagonist Mersault kill a man on a beach for reasons that are never quite explicitly spelled out. During the trial that occupies the second part of the narrative, it is not so much the killing that shocks the public but rather Mersault’s total apathy. He doesn’t believe in God and he didn’t even cry the day he learned of his mother’s death. The people consider him an antichrist and sentence him to death by guillotine.

The conceit of the novel is in many ways the inverse of the conceit in “Anatomy of a Fall,” a film that’s up for Best Picture among other accolades at the Oscars this year. In “The Stranger,” we read Mersault’s nuanced thoughts about life that actually contain a lot of existentialist wisdom. We know him not to be the monster that the public considers him. He kinda just likes to vibe, (although I guess sometimes the vibe leads you to kill people).

Contrastly, in Anatomy of a Fall, we don’t get to see the main character’s inner thoughts. We don’t even get to see the moment upon which the entire court drama hinges: the hour in which her husband died, either by his own hand in an act of suicide or by her hand in an act of homicide. Since this is a dramatic piece, rather than a narrative piece, we see Sandra from the outside, by what she says and does. We’re somewhat like the jury, judging for ourselves whether or not she killed him. But we’re also more intimate than that, somewhere closer to her blind son and the old lawyer friend she reconnects with for the case. We see her pain and her daily life, which is what the law and the press don’t see.

In refusing to explicitly show us the actual circumstances of her husband’s death, the film raises similar questions as “The Stranger.” Who are we? How are we different from the person the law, the public, and our loved ones think we are? Watching the film, we’re constantly waiting for the truth to be told to us, new information that makes us certain whether or not we should consider Sandra a killer or a victim. But it never comes— because in life that never comes. We cannot ever fully know another human being (a topic I also touched on in my post on “Past Lives”). We can only see them from the outside and only at certain moments.

Our instinct is to extrapolate from what we see and make a judgement on a person’s soul. “Anatomy of a Fall” challenges that instinct. It forces us to analyze her character. Instead of getting that piece of damning or exculpatory evidence, we see her relationships with other people. We wonder whether her friend believes her, whether her son believes her. This allows the film portray the complexities of who we are and how we relate to other people.

During the trial, the prosecution brings in the victim’s psychiatrist. He describes how Sandra’s husband thought of her as a castrating presence. Later, we hear an audio recording of the couple’s argument, where we get to hear what they “really” think. While he toils away on novels that never come into fruition, she continues to publish. She uses an idea from an abandoned project of his with his permission. He still resents her for it. He can never use it in his own project. Here we can see that ambiguity of human relationships. Perhaps she was a dictatorial, castrating wife he stole time and ideas away from him. On the other hand, maybe he wallowed in his own self-pity and blamed her for his own personal failures. Both are true at the same time in the movie. Either way, he still ends up dead.

The tragedy is not of a woman who gets carried away with her power over her husband. Neither is it that of an innocent woman wrongfully imprisoned for a murder she didn’t commit. The tragedy is that we cannot access the core of another human being. Even when they are saying what they “really” think, they are talking past each other. There is a core to each of us that cannot be communicated through our courts and not even through our very own words.