"This Cannes has turned out to be mostly about love – about how love is thwarted, denied, misinterpreted, but also nurtured and how it survives.
Justine Triet’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall was not my choice for the Palme d’Or but what an excellent film it is: deeply intelligent and very grownup, and given an arrowhead of emotional force by its German star: Sandra Hüller, playing a writer in a dysfunctional relationship.
It absorbed and gripped me. Hüller’s character is a woman whose unsatisfactory husband lies dead on the snowy path just outside their Alpine chalet having apparently fallen from the top window and hit his head on the way down. Was he pushed? Did he get his head wound before he fell? The movie wants to anatomise that fall in a court of law, but also anatomise the emotional descent of a failing marriage, subject to the awful gravity of disillusion. Hüller’s writer is starved of love: or is it rather that she cannot express what she feels in the ménage in which she finds herself. A bracingly excellent choice for the Palme.
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