“Wider”, “more ambitious”. Justine Triet’s collaborators are not lacking in praise on Anatomy of a fall, his fourth feature film, presented in competition at Cannes and which will be released in theaters on August 23. The film offers a dive into an assize court where a woman is accused of having killed her companion. A foreigner in France whose young son, visually impaired, is present in the courtroom.
After The Battle of Solferino (2013), fiction on the verge of a nervous breakdown filmed during the scenes of jubilation during the second round of the 2012 presidential election; Victoria (2016), dramatic comedy about a single lawyer; And Sibyl (2019), a kaleidoscopic psychological thriller about the loss of love, Anatomy of a fall revisits the trial film.
“Justine likes to move classic forms towards new prototypes: she may address her cinema to a wide audience, with an interest in romance, she remains an experimental director”, analyzes filmmaker Arthur Harari (Onoda, 2021), his companion, co-screenwriter ofAnatomy of a fall.
If the films of Justine Triet, 44, have been successful – in particular Victoria, with 640,000 admissions – so the director comes from cutting-edge auteur cinema. And in particular from the stable of producer Emmanuel Chaumet, defender of iconoclastic talents, who also hatched Benoît Forgeard (Gas of France, in 2015, yves, in 2019), Antonin Peretjatko (The law of the jungle, in 2016, The patch, in 2020) or Sophie Letourneur (Enormous in 2019, Travels in Italy, in 2023).
“Dissecting a couple”
Justine Triet’s cinema stops at this approximate, even not always honest way in which everyone talks about the others. An edgy journalist tries to report on an event in The Battle of Solferino ; the ex-husband of a lawyer recounts the failings on a pseudo-literary blog in Victoria ; a psychoanalyst cheerfully plunders the life of an actress to recompose it in a novel in Sibyl ; a woman finds herself described down to the smallest detail in court during simplistic pleadings in Anatomy of a fall…
“What obsesses me is the judicialization of the intimate, this place where you are told in your place, that is to say the very beginning of fiction”, explains the filmmaker. And this, without clear condemnation or ready-made thinking. “His staging always raises questions, but leaves space for the spectator to circulate. She does not impose a look, a moral or an idea: it is her elegance”, salutes its editor, Laurent Sénéchal.
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