Anatomy of a Fall

This isn't a movie review. This is a movie review.

I would have killed Samuel (Samuel Theis) in Anatomy of a Fall (Hulu), just for playing the rap song “P.I.M.P.” on a loop so loudly it ended the conversation between his wife and the journalist interviewing her. Why, as the women are talking, does Sandra (Sandra Hüller) sit there and tolerate the volume without going upstairs to ask Samuel to turn it down? It was driving me nuts. It was supposed to drive me nuts. Later, when questioned about tolerating the music, Sandra’s answer is lame, something like—because he liked to do it, and I learned to put up with it.

Honestly, this is the mystery that doesn’t get solved in the movie or in this piece, so if you’re concerned with spoilers, worry not. Anyway, this isn’t a movie review. 

I loved the movie. You should definitely see it. Finally this year a movie—directed by Justine Triet and co-written with her life partner, Arthur Harari—that held my interest. It’s a movie that loves being a movie and doling out courtroom-drama clues to build suspense. The camera is fascinated by the face of Sandra Hüller, who carries something of the mysterious sexiness of Jeanne Moreau but a German, wry and impassive version. She’s a wall you can project anything onto.

Lately, I’m seeing myself as the Statue of Liberty, stuck in the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes, when Charlton Heston realizes he's on planet Earth. I always thought Planet of the Apes was a parable about the women's movement, the way men saw women reversing the position of power and turning men into captives. That's not what I mean about me being the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes. I mean women pass me by and discover feminism, as if it's been buried in the sand all these years, because it has.

In my last post, when I wrote about the towering misogyny and sexism that has been leveled at Martha Stewart and Barbra Streisand throughout their lives, many comments here and on social media were like, jeeze, thank you for mentioning this, yes, women have a problem in the world in terms of the way they are seen, so if they’re successful that’s a sign they have the defect of over-reaching, and if they fail, that affirms they belong in second place. Thank you for pointing this out!

lauriestone.substack.com/p/martha-and-barbra

I mention this in relationship to Anatomy of a Fall because in the argument between Sandra and Samuel that's been recorded, he whines he has to pull his weight as a parent and supporter of his wife's career as a writer. He complains she is castrating him by shifting to him the responsibility of their domestic setup. Rightly, she says, no, muthafucker, I pull my weight here, and no, loser, you don't write because you don't write, not because I keep you from writing. But never does she laugh in his face the way a feminist would and say, Schmendrick, for 10.000 years there has been 100% expectation that women would do everything you are complaining about with zero support from men, and you have the audacity to throw this in my face, well, shut up.

The fight Sandra is  having with her husband isn’t merely a personal fight. It's a fight being played out in domestic settings across the entire globe. The domestic setting isn’t the issue. The ubiquity is the issue. Nowhere in the film do we see Samuel expressing the charm Sandra reports she fell in love with. By the time we meet these characters, she’s profoundly out of love with him and feels trapped in the setup on many levels. Samuel didn't need to jump out a window to let her go, of course. But he doesn't seem like a guy who could organize a less noisy departure.

And from the department of whiney men throwing tantrums because women think they're boring, the other night I happened upon a scene in the Spanish language series The Snow Girl (Netflix) that just about duplicates the fight between Sandra and Samuel. I'm not mentioning this as a point of plagiarism. I'm mentioning this as a reading of the zeitgeist.

In both scenes, a man has let go of a responsibility to the couple's child that produces catastrophic consequences for the child and the family. The man, guilty and pained, turns the situation around so the woman is to blame for neglecting her role as "mother," not only to the child but to the man. The claims are bogus in both scenes.

Both scenes—and especially in Anatomy of a Fall—perceptively dramatize the way, no matter what, the man puts himself in the center of everyone’s attention, pressing the woman to defend herself and take care of him. When she says she has no interest in taking care of him, he can’t forgive her for showing him he’s lost, accusing, and pathetic.

In Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra doesn't make the larger, social point about the sexual double standard (men can and women must not). She doesn’t make the point—not as a thesis or a diatribe but as the joke its persistence has become—because the character isn’t involved in the larger social point. The character isn’t involved in the larger social point because Justine Triet is 45 years old, and I don't need to tell you that for ambitious and accomplished women in that generation feminism and an anatomy of sexism and misogyny as the social condition that guides our lives is me in the sand as the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes.

Be this as it may (and it is), Anatomy of a Fall is a powerfully feminist film in its own terms, and those terms are the way the other women characters who surround Sandra become a force. Women of Triet’s generation don’t have a political analysis, but they have a sense of self that feminism has given them.

The trial takes place in France, where the family has been living in a remote chalet outside Grenoble. Samuel is French. Sandra is German, and the couple mainly speak to each other in English. Sandra is being railroaded by the male prosecutor, who, although ultimately thwarted, roosters around the courtroom with an almost absurd amount of misogynist glee, including reading aloud to the jury passages from a novel Sandra wrote to use as evidence of her murderous mindset.

The prosecution has no witnesses and no murder weapon, so it must rely on motive and opportunity to make its circumstantial case. It calls up only male expert witnesses, including Samuel’s shrink, who uses the “c” word. I mean castration! The prosecution paints Sandra as a bad woman, who sleeps with other women and who has stolen her husband’s thunder (and manhood) by using an idea of his in one of her books. Writers and lesbians kill. Everyone knows that.

Not so fast, rooster, say five women who are operative in the case: a female judge, a female lawyer on Sandra's team, the court-appointed guardian for the couple's son, the young journalist who was at the couple's house on the day the death occurred, and most importantly, a female forensics expert, who shows with tests and video imaging that Samuel jumped or fell from an attic window and was not pushed over a lower story balcony by Sandra.

Forensics expert demonstrating what happened in the fall.

In its way, the film shows how the world has turned. A woman in Sandra's position at an earlier time would have been rolled over by all the sexist assumptions and tactics the prosecution mounts. The women work like components in an emergent system that forms a wholeness not with a pilot or a scheme but through resonating affinities, alert inside each woman, to what feels fair and what feels unfair.

In the past, the woman on trial would have had no females around her to interpret things differently because women would not have been in positions of authority. And that concerted, alternate set of interpretations is what gets Sandra acquitted. I don't think her guilt is ever in question. I think the suspense in the film is: Can these women save this other women and get the job done?

Zooms, prompts, and biz

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Prompts

If you would like to try these, please do not post your writes in the comments section here. Please post them in “Notes,” where everyone can read and respond to them.

A person or couple is in the home of another person—they are house sitters, cat sitters, cleaners, thieves? They get dressed in the clothes of the people who live there. At some point the owners come home to find them.

Try writing the piece with a paragraph each in this order:

1 A moment of intense excitement and luxurious sense of aliveness with all senses alert.

2. The end of the story.

3. A moment of doubt.

4. The beginning of the story.

5. A moment of imagined fulfillment.

Try to create a tiny scene in each paragraph rather than summary and analysis. Remember humor. Remember horror and the joy of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Remember to love your crazy, human, vulnerable creatures.

A few images to play with:

Slits of light through a door that has been hacked.

The hopeful smell of toast.

Becoming surprisingly dangerous.

It was always kindness that surprised me.

A Writing Workshop on JUNE 15 from 3 to 5:30pm EST.

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Biz

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