Anatomy of a Fall Read the review of the film competing for the Oscar te

If the art of public life, as he wrote Baumann What she called “liquid modernity” is now reduced to the disclosure and public confession of private issues and feelings, perhaps in the French director's cinema Justine Triet serves well to confirm the philosopher's concepts. For years, Triet has been making films that problematize the “fluid” boundaries between public and private as well as the awardwinning Anatomy of a fall is the youngest of them.

In the plot, the viewer is invited to immerse themselves in the autumn of the title, which took place in a winter chalet in the French Alpine region. One afternoon the French husband of the German writer Sandra (Sandra Hueller) falls from a high window; His wife and son find him already dead in the snow. A trial will take place to decide whether the incident was a suicide, a murder or an accident. Sandra is incriminated, and over the course of two and a half hours we publicly learn the private details of this marriage, whether they are relevant to the investigation or not.

In the first shot, when Sandra is interviewed in the chalet by a young journalist, which triggers her husband's jealousy, the author asks the camera: “What do you want to know?” Triet obviously chooses this angle to address the question to the audience itself; Drawing our attention to the responsibility of our gaze (and the responsibility of cinema itself as a mediator) is the first step in problematizing the borderline ways in which the communication of individuality is established today.

If we lose track of the role that institutions, the state and the media the authorities established in the past, the “solid” modernity play in society, it is left to the small stages to stage this solidity. The court is one of them. Always a place par excellence for stories that want to understand how modernity presents itself with its organizational wishes, the courtyard is now, at least in Justine Triet's films, a stage for pantomime. This is evident when she directs a courtroom film like In Bed with Victoria (2016), as it is a comedy, but the comedy of the Kafkaesque trial remains in Anatomia de uma Queda (just think the absurd dialogue about the song by). 50 cents to give an example).

In this context, in which we must assume that the hoax can be taken for granted, knowing whether Sandra killed her husband or not becomes an unimportant detail in the face of the entire media theater in which order is at stake to confirm things. Likewise, in Secrets of a Scandal it is unimportant to know whether the woman convicted in the justice system survived Julianne Moore Has borne childhood traumas or not. The human experience in all its complexity is destroyed in the name of staging the public interest.

Triet sees the dehumanization of this process and his film then serves to punish us for the part of this theater that belongs to the viewer, which consists mainly of the morbidity of sensationalism. In times of true crime, Anatomia de uma Queda deals with this morbidity in a very satisfying way; There is the variety of footage filmed (the audio of the couple fighting, the grainy video of the police recreating the moments after the fall in the chalet) and there are always the different points of view in court, from the lawyers, the witnesses, the family members. Triet shifts from one perspective to the next with precision and alacrity, but it's less about illuminating the case and “seeking the truth” and more about engaging the viewer in what is essentially a game of narrative control . As the recording time increases, it becomes less about getting to the bottom of this truth and more about the image fixating on the viewer like an uncomfortable mirror.

This game works as a function of accumulation and exhaustion, and in that sense Anatomy of a Fall comes close to what Martin Scorsese I tried the three hours of Killers of the Flower Moon. Even when she subjects the viewer to debauchery, Triet never loses sight of her protagonist's humanity (her difficulties in French are the main sign that Sandra “rejects” the production machinery), and in any case we are dealing with a female filmmaker here do who obviously understands the pitfalls of this chimerical search for “truth”. That's not what it is about; Firstly, because it is convenient for a filmmaker in her field to understand the illusory nature of the filmed image, and secondly, because the concept of truth does not apply so much to liquid modernity, since everything that is modern is constantly changing.

Europe is perhaps the epicenter of this problem of modernity because at the “end of history” the entire idea of ​​the Old Continent as the cradle and culmination of this era is called into question. As an analyst of this turning point, Justine Triet initially presented herself in documentaries and feature films about politics and youth, and generational issues, especially motherhood, were anchored in her cinema like a nerve ending that absorbs and reacts to all these stimuli. From specific works on the French reality at this time MacronThe filmmaker embarks on fictional genre cinema because she understands that fables including their fragmentations, especially in satire are perhaps a better tool today to reflect and understand a reality that is difficult for us from a journalistic and documentary point of view diffusely presented and incoherent.

There is a method to this, evident in the repetition of themes such as the court, motherhood, and crimes whose solution eludes us, which Triet already discussed in “In Bed with Victoria.” By comparison, Anatomy of a Fall is tougher because Triet's second feature expanded his discussion of the publicprivate much more astutely (and, frankly, more enjoyably) to questions of citizenship, individualism, selfimage, and the routinization of spectacularization. What we have now is a Justine Triet who has rightly earned a place among the debaters on “serious issues.” His Palme d'Orwinning feature lives up to this achievement, even defending the right to tackle these issues solemnly, and very cleverly treads the line (if there is such a thing) between the open genre film and the courtroom thriller. and the prestige drama. The side effect of this is that the platform now seems a little further from where we are, in the everyday life of the audience.