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Rating:
Palme d'Or 2023 and Oscar for Best Original Screenplay 2024
There is much to say about a film like Anatomy of a Fall, a film that leaves endless points of reflection and just as many unanswered questions, insoluble, unsolvable like the case of a suspicious death from which begins the attempt to grasp and reconstruct what is most abstract and elusive: the reality of an event.
This is the key word in the reading of the Palme d'Or film: reality.
Anatomy of a Fall explores the very concept of reality and the unbridgeable distance that separates us from it. And will always separate us. The distorted idea we have of something too subjective and fragile.
Justine Triet's work speaks of the human, even desperate, need to understand an impossible-to-understand matter, and the choice we are ultimately forced to make regarding what we believe to be real and what not.
It speaks of the distance, increasingly thinner until it becomes indistinguishable, between what has happened and what is only hypothesized, imagined to cover the narrative void. And of that, in turn perhaps irreparable, between cultures: even if attracted and striving for an encounter, sooner or later they will break in front of the wall of diversity. A diversity that is also in personal realization, as well as in psychology. Thus, grudges are born and thus violence is born.
Anatomy of the fall of a sentimental relationship, whose tragic climax is only the end of a plunge into emptiness that began a long time ago. And in the end, in a scenario where fiction and reality intersect as in the creation of a novel - and of a film, or any narrative work - what has truly happened does not matter. Reality does not exist; it is a repository of memory present within the walls of one single person's mind.
"There's no such thing as truth" was said in Tonya.
"I don't give a fuck about what is reality," is said here.
The mystery remains above all. Murder or suicide? And how can someone no longer present be represented? How can one piece together the traces, the signs of the last months of a man's existence full of demons and resentment, hatred towards himself and his wife.
Judicial truth can be at most a tiny part of a vast complexity; even stolen audio tapes are a partial and distorted testimony of a much larger story.
And finally, this is a film that probes the world we live in, whose overwhelming and towering presence of the media is suggested more than shown, yet equally felt, perceived.
But more than anything else, Anatomy of a Fall reminds us how small and powerless we are in the face of the intangible. How naive it is to believe we can dominate events. Quantum physics has demonstrated that there is no objective reality.
Humanity has not yet accepted it, and perhaps never will be ready for it.
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