‘Anatomy of a Fall’ is a murder mystery that puts a marriage on trial – The Hollywood Reporter

Neon’s “Anatomy of a Fall” won the 2023 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Courtesy of Neon

to Anatomy of a fall, Justin Tritt and Arthur Harary co-wrote one of the most complex and intense couple relationships this year — a film that has already taken home the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is poised to be a major Oscar contender this season. Tritt and Harari are partners in real life (they have two children) and say approaching the story from this unique perspective proved “complicated” but “exciting.”

“Jodie Foster told me very funny things,” Tritt recalls. She said, “Well, when I start writing, I think about what my character is most ashamed of.” I didn’t think so at the first moment, but we were thinking that we have to dive (into) the mediocrity of this character, we have to be very honest. If we (write) a new movie about a couple (it’s) very safe, to say, ‘Okay, we’ve got some problems’… I think we had to be a little bit ugly in a way.”

Tritt, who also directed the film, adds that the story – which revolves around novelist Sandra Voyter (played by German actress Sandra Höller) who is suspected of murdering her husband Samuel after he is found dead from a fall from an attic window – was conceived. In two steps.

“Initially, the idea was of wanting to delve into the relationship, the couple, and their complexities,” the French director says through a translator. “Then the second idea was wanting to have this tandem of mother and child (Daniel, played by Milo Machado Graner), and this child trying to find out who his mother really is. The idea of ​​the trial then came to replace and connect those ideas.”

Tryt and Harari say prosecuting Sandra for the murder was a challenge in itself. Treat points out that things often get lost in translation because French expressions often don’t translate well into English. (American audiences may also be surprised by French legal procedures, which are very different.)

But the challenges were not limited to the courtroom scenes. The writing duo says working with the dog, who played the family pet, was technically difficult because in the scene where he discovers the body, they couldn’t get him to walk as slowly as they imagined on paper. Likewise, the first scene in which the dog’s ball falls ominously down the stairs proves disingenuous. “It took a lot of tries before we figured out that the only way to get it to go as fast as we wanted it to stop where we wanted it to stop so the dog could pick it up was to soak it in glue, “to change the way the ball came down,” explains Treat.

Whether Sandra actually killed Samuel – or whether he simply fell out of the attic window – it divided audiences around the world, which was Treat and Harari’s intention from the beginning.

“We worked to keep it as mysterious as possible,” Harari says. “Not because it’s a game, but because the main thing in this film is to get to that point where the kid is in real trouble, because he realizes that he’ll probably never know, and it’s torture for him. We had to put the audience in the same situation.”

This story first appeared in the November 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.