Anatomy of a Falling Marriage (After Hours Special), Weekly Reel #63
Two movies, “Anatomy of a Fall” and “After Hours,” that have nothing in common besides a three act structure that makes life harder for the protagonist over time.
News of the Week: I’ve been wanting to beef up the other sections of this blog, mostly Essays, to include more single-issue, long-form pieces that aren’t film reviews. I have things cooking, though I’m not sure how much longer they’ll stay in the oven.
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Anatomy of a Fall (2023, Justine Triet, France) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but more importantly, and prestigiously, Messi, playing Snoop, won the Palm Dog. This border collie extraordinaire is now in the company of legends: Sayuri (Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood), Nellie (RIP—Paterson), Dug (Up), and Mops (Marie Antoinette). While having one of the most arresting moments of any dog performance of all time in this film, Messi is also a very good boy.
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Psych.
Anatomy of a Fall is part of the neo-courtroom drama/thriller that’s having a moment after the lapse from the genre’s early aughts death. The robustness of The Burial and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, and Oppenheimer to a certain degree, show the power of genre conventions, which takes on a French twist in Anatomy of a Fall. Though it should’ve been France’s entry to the Oscars foreign language submissions instead of the tame The Taste of Things, Triet’s didshesdunnit shows that sarcasm and literary criticism can be used in murder trials, that young bald men can prosecute for the state, and that justice is partially blind or whatever level of blindness the son (Milo Machado-Graner) has.
Sandra Hüller, Germany’s best female actor at the moment who was also the female lead of the Grand Prix winner at Cannes—The Zone of Interest, plays the mother/wife, also named Sandra, and Samuel Theis plays the father/husband, Samuel. It begins at their panoramically luscious (yet somehow still middle-class) Grenoble chalet, where Sandra, a novelist, is being interviewed but is rudely interrupted by Samuel playing a steelpan cover of P.I.M.P. by 50 Cent. The interviewer leaves, the son, Daniel, takes Snoop for a walk, who later finds his dead father on the snowy ground when he gets back, apparently having fallen out of the window. He calls for this mother, who comes out unaware of the fall, having been asleep while the music was still blaring on single-track repeat. The death isn’t ruled accidental or suicidal when investigators suspect that a blow to his head was caused before the fall as well as evidence of recent domestic quarrelling. From then on, we’re solidly on the ropes of procedural tropes, where prosecutors become increasingly suspicious of Sandra, which lands them in court after an indictment following Daniel’s faulty memory and circumstantial inspective work.
While not sounding unique on paper, the strength of the film comes in the courtroom—the French courtroom. The jurors sit with the judge and other court bureaucratic figures ten feet above the room in a semi-circle. The left-hand side features the prosecutor, played here by Antoine Reinartz, one of the finest performances in the film, also raised but only about five feet. On the right sits the defendant and their legal team. And in front of the judge, directly cutting off prosecutor from defendant, is the witness stand. All court officials and legal representatives where gowns/robes with what looks like a cape draped over one shoulder, unfortunately unaided by English perukes. (Why is the layout of the courtroom in Saint Omer different?)
The film sets up Sandra as a sympathetic character, which is easy when the other spouse is dead. She’s represented by an old friend, Vincent (Swann Arlaud); her son doesn’t have suspicions in the beginning but the appearance of his French godmother comforting him followed by a court-appointed child supervisor creates an ever-distancing bridge between mother and son, which was strained already (according to the father, as revealed later) for linguistic reasons—perhaps the greatest Euro-insult is when Samuel complains about having to speak English, calling it her language even though she’s German. There are two strands of doubt that begin to push the narrative in uneasy directions regarding her supposed innocence: spousal relations and literary intent—the latter finally putting autofiction itself on trial, a genre that should’ve died from blunt force trauma to the head. Regarding the former, details of matters concerning man and wife, especially after their sexual separation following the trauma of Daniel’s accident that left him partially blind, and moreover from Sandra cheating with a woman at that time, come up in the courtroom and are judged from all sides by multiple people outside of that relationship, where only one person alive has primary source knowledge. The film shows the murkiness of judging a relationship this way, in bits and pieces without a construction of the whole. An audio recording of a verbal argument that led to a brief physical altercation doesn’t play well, especially if it was taken the day before the death.
On top of that, Triet, who wrote the story explicitly for Sandra Hüller along with her partner and co-writer Arthur Harari, brings Sandra’s literature into the fray. Read into the record by the shifty avocat général, Sandra’s novels, which are supposedly based on real events in her life, are used against her to prove certain aspects about her character that something like psychoanalysis cannot. But can, or rather, should they? Asked the meta-question of whether her novel’s characters are her, she responded affirmatively, as in, yes, of course my literary characters are me, all of them, so what? Exactly. What do characters reveal about their authors? While the novels don’t lead anywhere substantial in the case, it moves along the central thesis of the film: how many parts of the puzzle must one put together to reveal the whole? This matter is complicated by the fact that one of her published plots came from her husband, a less motivated writer who may have resented her notoriety. Though this one story was a part of him initially, she was able to graft it onto her own story, which is a nice way of explaining how literature in general functions: empathy through avatars, parts connecting to create a closer whole.
To peak slightly into the closing of the second and beginning of the third act, we listen to a tape recording of the fight Sandra and Samuel had the day before the death, which transports us back in time to watch. This privileged perspective, one that puts the unseen physical altercation later at the heart of the prosecutor’s case of intent, is arresting. It’s where the climax of perfect performances peak, was the Palme d’Or winning scene, and reaches a level of Hitchcock that everyone wishes they can come near. That’s all I’ll give you.
Anatomy of a Fall is playing in theaters.
Save for Later
After Hours (1985, Martin Scorsese, USA) is the perfect Scorsese film to hold in your back pocket for a rainy day. It’s his shortest (real) feature-fiction film that flies at the speed of anxiety; he may have kicked cocaine several years earlier, but the speed remained. For Scorsese imitators, this could be the model, not only because of its relative simplicity in the Scorsese oeuvre but because the script was a film school project written by a young Joseph Minion, sexual anxieties and all. The premise is simple: yuppie can’t get home in post-midnight SoHo. Add raising stakes and other screenplay necessities and you’ve got a tight ninety-seven minutes of cult film fun.
Scorsese’s filmography over the decades has allowed everyone to re-evaluate his highs and lows for a long time and in many cycles. So much so that the aughts is the only decade since the nineteen-seventies in which one of his films can’t be argued as the best of that decade (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, we’ll see how the critical consensus of Killers of the Flower Moon develops over time), unless you love Nicholson’s demented performance in The Departed. Asking which decade is Scorsese’s best had usually come down to the seventies versus the nineties, but in recent years via film twitter and Letterboxd, the cult classics from the eighties has emerged as a heavyweight contender. Although Raging Bull (1980) kicked off this decade the best way possible, his slump in trying to get The Last Temptation (1988) off the ground led to a trilogy of in-between projects that are quickly percolating through the ranks: The King of Comedy (1982), After Hours (1985), and The Color of Money (1986).
Critical and popular re-appraisals for these films, aided by Scorsese’s effervescent presence during the writers/actors’ strikes, have thrown them into the spotlight. The King of Comedy was filmed directly after Scorsese was hospitalized for exhaustion and pneumonia, which may be one reason he doesn’t think fondly of this film today. It’s hard to evaluate the performance of Jerry Lewis in particular, who’s a figure nobody under a certain age will know today and was likely thrown in as a nod to the French. De Niro was correct in saying that the public didn’t respond well to it upon its release because it revealed something they didn’t want to see at the time. To use the cliché, The King of Comedy is more relevant now more than ever, and of course waiting to be revived today, which is what happened with 2019’s Joker. The Color of Money is a direct sequel to 1961’s The Hustler, which saw the return of Paul Newman as Fast Eddie but now with fresh-newborn Tom Cruise, who was born a year after the original. The film was seminal for both actors: Newman won the Oscar and Cruise got to work with a registered auteur and learn from Newman. Although this film is regarded as the weakest of the three—cool shots of billiards action can only go so far—it certainly wasn’t a low compared to other decades’ lows.
After Hours was smooshed between The King of Comedy and The Color of Money, which features a dilapidated New York, even worse than in Taxi Driver, full of trash, home robberies (done by Cheech & Chong), several women strangely attracted to Griffin Dunne, and Club Berlin—filled with punks and Martin Scorsese manning the second-floor spotlight. The opening and closing scenes take place at Paul Hackett’s (Dunne) work, which last about thirty seconds in all and features, in my imagination, the camera operator zooming around on an office chair. A series of unfortunate events compels Paul from one roadblock to another—losing his money, losing his keys, losing his libido, etc.—that never lined up enough for Paul to make it home. He’s semi-forced to roam around the sometimes rainy streets where someone from fifteen minutes ago is back to haunt him in some way.
The film falls squarely in the fun Scorsese film camp; he can’t always be making seminal American Dream achievement/rot dressed up as American gangster films. Nor is it a religious tome or a tribute to a past form of entertainment/industry. It’s fast and fun and for the whole family.
Pass
Nothing, I’ve only seen Greatness this week.
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