'Anatomy of a Fall' is a smartly constructed courtroom drama

The first scene is the best. It’s mid-afternoon and successful author Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is entertaining an interviewer at her chalet in the French Alps. It’s a little early for a glass of wine but she’s having one anyway, and it might not be misreading things to note that Sandra’s being a bit flirty with the female journalist — an attractive grad student who, all told, looks like she’d have been a lot more comfortable doing this at a coffee shop. From upstairs, a steel-drum cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” is blasting through the ceiling and the stairwell on repeat. Sandra’s husband Samuel is up there, supposedly working. They’ve just had yet another argument, so he’s passive-aggressively tanking his wife’s interview by drowning it out with background music. It’s so loud nobody can hear themselves think. Least of all that poor reporter.

Within the hour, Sandra’s husband will be dead outside in the snow, having toppled from the third floor terrace. His body is discovered by their visually impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) and his trusty service dog, Snoop, while that infernally catchy 50 Cent cover is still clamoring away upstairs. Samuel could have slipped, but the physical evidence indicates that is extremely unlikely. He either threw himself off the terrace or he was pushed. Writer-director Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a slippery two-and-a-half-hour procedural about the ensuing investigation and trial, during which every revelation reinforces just how little we can truly know the people closest to us.

It’s a solid, smartly constructed courtroom drama, the kind of sophisticated entertainment for adults that one usually has to find overseas or on television these days. In fact, despite the pedigree of being awarded top prize at the world’s foremost film festival, “Anatomy of a Fall” reminded me most of one of those prestige cable miniseries that your co-workers are always going on about on Monday mornings, especially when they’re disappointed by the ending. My friend, the brilliant Turkish film critic Ali Arikan, messaged me after the movie, calling it “a late ‘80s/early ‘90s fourth-pick Best Picture nominee from Paramount wearing European fashions.” A harsh critique, but not an incorrect one. Given the intensity of advance praise from festivals, I think we were both expecting to be overwhelmed by “Anatomy of a Fall,” which was not the case. But I wasn’t necessarily underwhelmed either. Is it okay to just be whelmed?

What’s good about the picture is very good. Especially Sandra Hüller, who you might remember gave one of the most fearless comedic performances of our time in director Maren Ade’s incomparable 2016 “Toni Erdmann.” Not nearly as funny in this film, Hüller is at once alluring and aloof, able to radiate an intimidating intelligence and self-possession. Her eyes invite the audience in close and then ruthlessly freeze us out. You can see why being married to Sandra drove Samuel mad sometimes. But was that enough to send him over the edge, or did she also give him a push? A flashback to a knock-down, drag-out spat during which we finally meet Samuel (well-played by Samuel Theis) is the picture’s other high point, briefly recalling Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” in how often our sympathies sway from side to side.

Director Triet penned the screenplay with her longtime romantic partner Arthur Harari, and they’re especially adept at managing the slow trickle of information that keeps us on our toes during the talky courtroom proceedings. (As noted during last year’s “Saint Omer,” viewers raised on American TV lawyer shows will find the French legal system quite entertainingly unhinged.) But the writers can’t resist putting a little too fine of a point on things, especially when it comes to young Daniel, the (cough) blind witness who takes center stage during the film’s final act. Racked with guilt and confusion after hearing all the graphic details of his parents’ horrible marriage spilled out under oath, the boy is advised by a caretaker that he should simply decide what he wants to be true and believe it as such. This sentiment is very much the key to the picture. In fact, it’s such an intriguing moral for a movie to espouse, you’ll wish Triet and Harari had found a more artful way to express it besides having a bit player just blurt it out.

The couple’s previous picture, 2019’s “Sibyl” also featured Hüller, albeit in a much smaller, funnier role. The film starred Virginie Efira as a psychotherapist who wants to be a novelist and can’t help pilfering her patients’ lives for material. Unfolding as a nesting doll of flashbacks and fabrications, it’s a wild, sexy movie dealing with a lot of the same underlying issues in a more irreverent fashion. “Sibyl” wasn’t afraid to be a little lurid, and it wouldn’t take much to tip “Anatomy of a Fall” in a similar direction. (Following my friend Ali’s logic, I can easily imagine it as an Ashley Judd movie from Sherry Lansing’s Paramount era.) Instead, what we’re left with is a well-acted melodrama from which all the melodrama has been tastefully drained. It’s a classy picture, probably too classy for a movie that starts with a steel drum band playing “P.I.M.P.”

“Anatomy of a Fall” is now in theaters.