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Justine Triet, the writer-director behind this year’s Palme d’Or winner, “Anatomy of a Fall,” makes films about the misadventures of working girls and the double standards faced by mothers who have the audacity to be Well, not very motherly. Triet has directed romantic comedies, relationship dramas, and now a courtroom whodunit—all of which magnify the fears and anxieties of women who work hard and play hard.
Movies about victims are out of the question.
“I have seen hundreds and hundreds of movies in which women are raped, murdered and dismembered; movies that say ‘look at this poor suffering woman,’” Triet said recently over drinks in Midtown Manhattan. “Why should I make another one?”
Instead, “Anatomy of a Fall,” the fourth feature from the 45-year-old French filmmaker, judges a powerful woman and asks: How does a reversal of gender roles transform the way we perceive guilt and innocence?
Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is an acclaimed novelist and translator; She’s cocky, bisexual, and her tough look could disperse a crowd. She is a German who lives in a multi-story chalet in the French Alps with her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and her 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is blind. Samuel is also a writer; his career just isn’t that important.
In the film’s opening sequence, we see Sandra being interviewed by a graduate student while a steel drum version of 50 Cent’s “PIMP” plays on deafening repeat. The music, vengefully played by Samuel from an upper room, interrupts Sandra’s flirtatious discussion. Tensions are high, so when Daniel finds his father, face up in the snow, dead after falling from a top-story window, Sandra becomes the only suspect.
“I wanted to show how a woman can be attacked precisely because of her intelligence, ambition and mental strength,” Triet said. Sandra, she added, was “shattered by a moralistic society that intensely scrutinizes the way women choose to live their lives.”
Triet developed the project with Hüller, a German actress best known for playing a female killjoy in “Toni Erdmann,” in mind from the beginning. Hüller’s character “may seem cold and hostile, but not like a caricatured femme fatale,” Triet said. “That’s just her natural way of being, which communicates an opacity that makes her seem threatening and that says, ‘I’m not a perfect mother.’ I’m human,’” she added.
Hüller said she played Sandra with the kind of warmth and emotion that doesn’t rely on easily empathetic gestures, such as constantly crying and smiling. The character “is a real adult person, which is rare,” Hüller said in a recent phone interview. “She makes no apologies for who she is, even if it gets her in trouble.”
“Anatomy of a Fall” was co-written by Triet and her husband, filmmaker Arthur Harari, during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, which the couple spent in isolation with their two children. Harari helped write the script for Triet’s previous film, the shocking psychodrama “Sibyl,” but “Anatomy of a Fall” was a true “bringing together of two brains,” forged intimately behind closed doors, Triet said.
In “Anatomy of a Fall,” Sandra and Samuel’s literary rivalry, and their process of sifting through their own lives for inspiration, is used against Sandra in court. A sort of nesting doll effect is evident in the parallels between the real and fictional couples (Triet and Harari, Sandra and Samuel, and the characters in the fictional couple’s books), but the director said that the artistic disputes between husband and woman in the film They were not autobiographical.
Triet and Harari treated the feature “as a playground, as well as a nightmare vision of what will never happen to us,” Harari wrote in an email. “Justine is and was more “successful” than me, but I am very far from Samuel. “I probably identify with Sandra the most!”
Triet said she grew up wanting to be a painter. Her parents were enthusiastic film buffs (her father once worked as a projectionist), but her desire to make films came relatively late. In art school, she took video and editing courses that inspired her to switch gears and immerse herself in the work of documentary pioneers and experimental filmmakers for whom the distinction between fiction and reality was irrelevant: Frederick Wiseman, Shirley Clarke, Allan King , Raymond Sorry.
Triet began his film career making chaotically expressionist documentary shorts about contemporary politics, including one about the 2007 presidential election in France. Eventually, she began writing her own screenplays and made her film debut in 2013 with “The Age of Panic,” a frenetic farce shot quickly and on a shoestring budget with a mix of professional and non-professional actors. The film follows a single mother dealing with an abrasive ex-husband and a childish new boyfriend while working as a cable news reporter.
Nowadays, Triet admits that she’s something of a control freak when it comes to the writing and editing stages of a film, marking a departure from the guerrilla-style methods of her first act. On set, however, Triet continues to embrace the sense of freedom that defined his early work: “I would never show up on a shoot and say, ‘I know exactly what I want. Do this, do that, because I’m the director,’” Triet said.
“A set is not dictated by a sacred hierarchy,” he added. “It is a space of exploration where you have to be very humble. It is the only way to create something genuinely new.”
When “Anatomy of a Fall” won the Palme d’Or, Triet became the third woman to win the award. The first was Jane Campion for “The Piano” in 1993; the second, Triet’s compatriot, Julia Ducournau, for “Titane” in 2021.
“When I started making films, ‘feminism’ wasn’t really considered a serious cinematic topic in France,” Triet said. “But since then, even my point of view has evolved. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it really means to be a woman, to have authority as a woman, and how we are treated like monsters for behaving in certain ways that men are normally forgiven for.”
“It has taken us a while to realize that there is a problem of representation,” she added, praising a recent shift in awareness about gender equality in the French film industry. “The world changes. If you can’t see that, well. You will have to learn.”