Anatomy of a fall: how was the Palme d’or 2023 born?

What is it about ? Sandra, Samuel and their 11-year-old visually impaired son, Daniel, have been living far from everything in the mountains for a year. One day, Samuel is found dead at the foot of their house. A suspicious death investigation has been opened. Sandra is soon charged despite the doubt: suicide or homicide? A year later, Daniel attends his mother’s trial, a true dissection of the couple.

The defeat of a couple

With Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet wanted to make a film centered on the defeat of a couple. The idea was, for the director, to tell the fall of a body in a technical way and to make it the image of the debacle of a love story: “This couple has a son who discovers his parents’ history in a trial – a trial that methodically dissects their relationship – and this boy goes from the stage of childhood, embodied by absolute trust in his mother, to that of doubt. “

“And the film will look at this passage. In my previous films, the children were present, but did not have the floor, they were there; but we did not have their point of view. It is as if the moment was come to integrate the child’s gaze into the story, to balance it with that of Sandra, the central character. The film has gradually become like a long interrogation: from the house to the court, it is only ‘a succession of scenes where the characters are questioned.

“I wanted to return to more realism, in the almost documentary sense, whether in writing or formally. But it was to go further in complexity, in what the film tells as much as in emotions. he can produce. Everything has been towards a greater stripping down: there is no additional music, the film is more raw, more bare than my previous ones”confides Justine Triet.

Reunion with Sandra Hüller

Justine Triet wrote Anatomy of a Fall for Sandra Hüller. The filmmaker wanted to work with the actress again after Sibyl: “I wrote for her, she knew it, it was one of the things that stimulated me from the start. This free woman who is finally judged also for the way she has of living her sexuality, her work, her motherhood: I thought that she would bring a complexity, an impurity to the character, that she would completely remove the notion of “message “. And then, we really met on the set.”

A record score of 4.4 out of 5: it is on the podium of the best films of 2023!

A criminal lawyer as a consultant

Justine Triet co-wrote the film with Arthur Harari. The scenario is not adapted from a real event, but the director wanted the whole thing to be as authentic as possible. The screenwriters thus called on a criminal lawyer, Vincent Courcelle-Labrousse, whom they solicited on the technical aspects of the film, but also on the French conception of the audience:

“What surprised us was the somewhat messy side of a trial in France, unlike in the United States where speech is distributed more rigidly. This aspect allowed me to make a very French film, and to take the opposite view of the American trial film, which is much more spectacular. The idea of ​​​​attending uninterrupted blocks of audience has imposed itself.”

“I spent my time asking my editor, Laurent Sénéchal, to slow down the pace, to keep the shots imperfect, blurry, a bit shaky. I didn’t want a comfortable, too clean film”remembers Justine Triet.

Finding Daniel

The interpreter of Daniel, the child, was difficult to find. Justine Triet and her “acting collaborator” Cynthia Arra first cast visually impaired children for four months. Then, as they couldn’t find it, they opened the casting to sighted children for three more months, before falling on Milo: “It was Jill Gagé (in casting reinforcement) who found him. He was immediately impressive, as if he weren’t playing.”

“He learned the piano intensively, and then, with Cynthia, we looked together for the level of visual impairment with the help of people specializing in visual impairment. We opted for a visual impairment that is as light as possible to embody , high myopia without impairment of peripheral vision. He is a child who has exceptional intellectual and emotional capacities, with a kind of melancholic vibration.”

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Antoine Reinartz VS Swann Arlaud

Antoine Reinartz plays the Advocate General. Justine Triet chose it for the modernity it gives to the character: “He brings otherness into the film, he brings in the contemporary world and it breaks the dusty solemnity of the trial… He plays the villain in a way, but a very seductive, devious, flamboyant villain. He speaks instead of the dead and must return the latter, whom we hardly ever see, endearing, make us understand, as the jurors, that this man deserves to be defended.Antoine brings an arena dimension to the court, the civilized violence of the prosecution. “

In the shoes of the defendant’s lawyer, Swann Arlaud plays a rather fragile and defensive character: “I didn’t want a cockfight between them. Vincent is not a virtuoso of the bar, he is good but not idealized. Swann brings a subtlety of play, an apprehension, because he knows his client. I found interesting that he is somehow a double of Samuel, that the two are a bit alike, we understand that Sandra and he met years ago, and that there is something between them that is not entirely extinguished “notes the filmmaker.