If the sad sires of the net quick to spit on the French side of the cinema were already spoiled by the disastrous entrances of the next Palme d'or, the results of the box office were able to quickly nail their beaks.Anatomy of a fallWould it be the next salutary phenomenon for cinemas? This is in any case all that one can wish to the brilliant Justine Triet who again proposes a powerful intimate and feminine work, supernatant with a remarkableselection of the Cannes 2023 festival.
Shh!
Anatomy of a chut, here's how we should've called the last movie ofJustine Sort,that she staged alongside her companionArthur Harari(the director behind the greatOnoda, 10,000 nights in the jungle). And if this word game is part of the bursting memes playing with a syntactic change in the title of the Palme gold, « Chut » seems to be the appropriate interjection to decorate the springs at work in this feature film. A true film of restraint, in the most physical sense of the term. But before we dive into a brief analysis of the film via this reading prism, let us remember in a few lines the starting point of the film.Anatomy of a fall.
A couple of writers, Sandra (Sandra Hüller, to be discovered soon in the nextJonathan Glazer) and Samuel (Samuel Theis), live with their visually impaired eleven-year-old son DanielMilo Machado Graner) in a mountain chalet. When Daniel goes down the snowy slopes surrounding the property, accompanied by his guide dog Snoop, he does not yet know that after his short walk his father's inanimate body will welcome him at the foot of the dwelling. The location of the corpse in the axis of the highest window of the mazot inexorably nourishes the thesis of suicide, soon questioned by several details which hardly escape the eyes of the investigators. So what happened between Sandra and Samuel during the minutes before the husband died, that's the question that immediately ignites the minds of the police, the press and the court.
Collective equity
A ball bouncing on the steps of a staircase, coming from the limbs of the attic bathed in shadows, where an invisible hand seems to have dropped. OpeningAnatomy of a fallOf course borrows from the codes of horror cinema, of which the brief incursion (and almost soon thwarted by the appearance of Snoop, of which one understands that he pursues the ball) is not however meaningless. Because it is in this part of the cinema that it is possible to extract the keys in order to try to develop a first reading ofAnatomy of a fall.
A horror movie that first incarnates in Daniel's character. If each of the parents takes as its first name the one of the actress/actor who incarnates (Sandra for Sandra Hüller, Samuel for Samuel Theis), the child of the couple derogates from the rule. Justine Triet decides to name him Daniel (for a young actor named Milo). A transgression that inevitably points to a conscious will of the author, founding a certain gelality with little Daniel Anthony Torrance ofShining, child light. Easy and arbitrary comparison that this simple sharing of surnames, if it was not supported by a common appearance between the two boys. Indeed, as in the adaptation ofStanley KubrickFrom King's novel, the Daniel de Triet has the same old-fashioned bowl. The situation of a couple in crisis locked up in a snow-covered mountain chalet then ends up binding the child ofAnatomy of a fallto Kubrick's Danny in his Kingian adaptation.
« I think it's an overrated classic. »
A film Triet invokes as an inevitable reference while paradoxically finding it "unbearably stupid". And it's probably not Stephen King who would say otherwise, he who always felt betrayed by Kubrick's adaptation. Indeed, where the book fed on a haunting alcoholism story Jack Torrance – an addiction of which the writer himself was the victim – the father ofEyes Wide Shutis limited to representing a mere murderous madness in his film, elucidating in passing the whole dimension related to his addiction to alcohol... In short, a feature film of course impressive by the horrific imagination that he deploys while stagnating on the surface of the literary material he exploits.
And if the Danny of Stephen King's work – a writer whose name is also used by the lawyer later in the film – is gifted withshining(a medium capacity in a few ways), Justine Triet's Daniel isa contrarioprevented by a semi-blindly tenacious. Far from the parapsychological faculties of his double literary allowing him to see beyond the possible field,Anatomy of a fallis a boy with a veiled vision of a visible cataract, forcing him to bend his eyes and bend the echine to try to decipher what is a few centimetres from his retina.
The Ball of the Blind
Behold them, my soul; They're awful!
Same as mannequins; vaguely ridiculous;
Terrible, singular like sleepwalks;
Dardant we don't know where their dark globes are.
Their eyes, where the divine spark left,
As if they looked away, stay up
In heaven; you never see them on the pavement
Dreamingly leaning their heads weightless.
They thus cross the unlimited black,
That brother of eternal silence. O city!
While around us you sing, laugh and beugles,
Enjoying up to atrocity,
See! I'm hanging out too! But more than hebate,
I say: What are they looking for in Heaven, all these blind people?
Baudelaire, « The blind »,Flowers of evil
Blind at Triet is not the one depicted in Renaissance paintings. These monstrosities, the twisted neck like that of an greedy stork, the blabard and waxy complexion, are featured notably in Breughel's paintingThe Parabole of the Blind(see below). A vision that Baudelaire takes up in the first strophes of his sonnet before turning the initial representation of the visually impaired into a pure being of thought... The one to whom the divine spark at the bottom of the eye is torn closes to what remains of divine, in the equally obscure depths of his brain (to understand this, nothing better than reading« The blind and the philosopher» by Marion Chottin).
From Brueghel to Argento
But if we abandon the philosophical pan whose evolution, we have seen, jumps from being amputated to being grafted from powerderogatory(a sort ofshining, in a way ?), it is again in the genre cinema that we will draw the representation of the blindness closest to what this year's Golden Palm offers. To do this, you will have to search the photograms of the undisputed master of the gialloDario Argento, and more precisely in two titles at two extremes of the famous Italian career :The Nine-tailed Cat (of its animal trilogy) and its latest, presented at NIFFF 2022,Occhiali neri.
These two feature films, despite the fifty years that separate them temporally (1971 & 2021), propose in the construction of their scenario two similar characters: a blind adult and a child, trying to escape from the grip of a maniac killer. The figure of blindness is thus mounted in counterpoint of a scopic impulse emerging in the killer (or the spectator, which finally returns to the same), impulse itself incarnated and empowered by camera movements in subjective view, as escaped from the hands of the director and existing autarchically in the film.
The blind adult assisted by the child of Argento becomes at Triet one and the same child, just as visually impaired, while the evanescent killer who pursues them materializes in the French filmmaker by the horror visions triggered by Daniel during the trial. And it will also find the same subjective view at several moments ofAnatomy of a fall: a sovereign camera, floating through the hallways of the chalet in the way of flying journeysSam RaimiinEvil Dead(of the genre cinema, again!), to reveal to the spectator empty boxes of aspirin in a trash can, for example. Again, the scopic impulse is not far away, and the impudence of the very mechanism of the trial seems to incarnate the whole.
Anatomy of a breach
The breach dug with axe by Jack Nicholson in the door of a bedroom of the Overlook is reflected here in a more metaphorical opening but cut just as violently on the privacy of a mother. And the strength ofAnatomy of a fallwill be born of the duality between the scopophilia of the spectator (and of the court) wanting at all costs to slip one (bad?) eye into this breach, and the empathy that one will feel for poor Daniel forced to listen to the tearing of his parents' couple (until the obsession, term that he will use himself in the feature film).
The child who would (his) see, and on whom the entire investigation is based, prepares to be crushed by the judicial jaw and the images (always they!) that she brings up: bisexuality and deception of the mother, apudic reconstruction of the fall and the projections of blood, sound violence of these speakers fearing the recorded disputes of her parents... And the rooting of a doubt, inexorable, about the potential guilt of his own breeder. Exciting reflections (and terrifying!) on the otherness of the one we love, which we think we know all about but flaws from which finally extracts this disorder of dark matter that we should have left buried.
End of night travel
A rich film, whose length – more than 2h30 – is never felt thanks to a particularly sharp direction of editing. The subtle camera movements are part of a choking sensation that only swells in the film since the title rang.I.M.P.of 50 Cent taken by Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band. Festive, dancing music moving from passive-aggressive provocation (at the beginning of the film) to a real instrument of coercion (during the reconstitution).
Maybe we'd blame him.Anatomy of a fallthe implied (and sensual tension) maintained between Vincent the lawyer (Swann Arlaud) and Sandra, which adds to the story that a surface varnish not necessarily welcome. While it is an opportunity for Triet to create a close relationship between the two characters so that certain issues of the trial can be explained more easily, Vincent's character remains only a functional shell for the script but finally rather hollow.
Maigre reproaches to apologise for an exciting work, which might not necessarily have been our Golden Palm (we eagerly look for the release ofThe Zone of Interestof theJonathan Glazer, with the same Sandra Hüller who seems to be of all the cinematic nuggets of 2023 but who is widely worth viewing. And seen the returns of the first entries (best start of a Palme d'or at the cinema sinceBetween the wallsof theLaurent CantetIn 2008, let's make sure that Justine Triet's film is not only a festival phenomenon, but also a real success at the box office!
Oula I reserve your article after seeing the movie, I would like to remain blank of all information as I know nothing about anatomy of a fall. Yes, yes, it's possible! ^^^
The same for the shot, I want to know as little as possible when I find out. 😉
Yes, you're right, it's better to discover it blank of all information (it was more or less my case at viewing, and it was a nice surprise ^^).
Hey, I saw him yesterday and I was trying to make a little video. I read your article that I found very interesting. Danny is certain. And indeed he also borrows from genre cinema. It's a very original angle you adopt.
I liked the film even though the choice of the golden palm is more questionable in my opinion. It's very well written but it's a cinema that I find very cold in its approach. It is intended not to join one character more than any other except for the little one in the last third.
You'll tell me, I (almost) felt the same way about The Zone of Interest. Very nice cultural object but which left on the tile in terms of emotional involvement.
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