Justine Triet, the writer and director behind this year’s Palme d’Or winner, “Anatomy of a Fall,” makes movies about the misadventures of working girls and the double standards faced by mothers who have the audacity to be, well, unmotherly. Triet has directed romcoms, relationship dramas and now, a courtroom whodunit: all magnify the fears and anxieties of women who work and play hard.
Movies about victims are off the table.
“I’ve watched hundreds and hundreds of films in which women are violated, killed, chopped up — films that say ‘look at this poor, suffering woman,’” Triet said recently over a drink in Midtown Manhattan. “Why should I make another one?”
Instead, “Anatomy of a Fall,” the fourth feature by the 45-year-old French filmmaker, places a powerful woman on trial 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 flinty gaze could scatter a crowd. She’s a German living in a multistory chalet in the French alps with her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their 11-year old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is blind. Samuel is a writer, too — his career is just not as important.
In the film’s opening sequence, we see Sandra being interviewed by a female graduate student as a steel drum version of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” plays on deafening repeat. The music — blasted vengefully by Samuel from an upper room — cuts Sandra’s flirty discussion short. Tensions are high, so when Daniel finds his father, face up on the snow, dead after a tumble from the top floor window, Sandra becomes the sole suspect.
“I wanted to show how a woman might come under attack precisely because of her intelligence, ambition and her mental fortitude,” Triet said. Sandra, she added, was “broken down by a moralistic society that intensely scrutinizes the way women choose to lead their lives.”
Triet developed the project with Hüller, a German actress best known for playing a killjoy career-woman in “Toni Erdmann,” in mind from the get-go. Hüller’s character “can come off as cold and hostile, but not in a caricatured femme fatale way,” Triet said. “That’s just her natural way of being, which communicates both an opacity that makes her seem threatening, and it 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, like crying and smiling constantly. The character “is a real grown-up person, which is rare,” Hüller said in a recent phone interview. “She doesn’t apologize for who she is, even if that gets her into trouble.”
“Anatomy of a Fall” was co-written by Triet and her husband, the filmmaker Arthur Harari, during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, which the couple spent in isolation with their two children. Harari helped write the screenplay for Triet’s previous film, the punchy psychodrama “Sibyl,” but “Anatomy of a Fall” was a true “union of two brains,” forged intimately behind doors closed, Triet said.
In “Anatomy of a Fall,” Sandra and Samuel’s literary rivalry, and their process of culling their own lives for inspiration, is used against Sandra in court. A kind of nesting doll effect is apparent 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 spats between husband and wife in the film weren’t autobiographical.
Triet and Harari treated the feature “as a playground, as well as a nightmare vision of what will never happen to us,” wrote Harari in an email. “Justine is and was more “successful” than I am, but I’m very far from Samuel. I probably relate more to Sandra!”
Triet said she grew up wanting to be a painter. Her parents were enthusiastic moviegoers —her father once worked as a projectionist — but her desire to make movies 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 fact was irrelevant: Frederick Wiseman, Shirley Clarke, Allan King, Raymond Depardon.
Triet began her filmmaking career making chaotically expressionistic documentary shorts about contemporary politics, including one about the 2007 presidential election in France. Eventually, she began to write her own scripts, making her feature debut in 2013 with “The Age of Panic,” a frenzied farce shot quickly and on a shoestring budget with a blend of professional and nonprofessional actors. The film follows a single mother dealing with an abrasive ex-husband and infantile new boyfriend while on assignment for her job as a cable news reporter.
Nowadays, Triet admits she’s somewhat of a control freak when it comes to the writing and editing stages of a film, which marks a departure from her first act’s guerilla-style methods. On set, however, Triet continues to embrace the sense of freedom that defined her early work: “I’d never show up to a shoot and say ‘I know exactly what I want. Do this, do that, because I’m the director,’” Triet said.
“A set isn’t dictated by some sacred hierarchy,” she added. “It’s a space of exploration where one should be very humble. It’s the only the way to create something genuinely new.”
When “Anatomy of a Fall” won the Palme d’Or, Triet became only the third woman to win the award. The first was Jane Campion for “The Piano” in 1993; the second, Triet’s countrywoman Julia Ducournau for “Titane” in 2021.
“When I started making films, ‘feminism’ wasn’t really considered a serious cinematic subject in France,” Triet said. “But since then, even my point of view has evolved. I’ve put a lot of time into thinking about what it truly means to be a woman — to have authority as a woman — and how we’re treated as monsters for behaving in certain ways that men are usually forgiven for,.”
“It’s taken us a while to see that there’s a representation problem,” she added, praising a recent shift in awareness over gender equality in France’s film industry. “The world changes. If you can’t see that — oh well. You will have to learn.”
