Anatomy of a Fall: My Terrible Ending (Spoiler Alert)
I get it. It was only a few minutes into this Oscar nominee for Best Picture that I said aloud, “We are never going to be given the answer as to whether or not this is a murder." People love the ambiguity and uncertainty this crime/relationship drama leaves the viewer with at the end. You are stuck seeing it both ways at once…or even more than two ways. It’s a suicide. It’s a murder. It’s someone driven to suicide, so it may as well be murder. Anatomy of a Fall is the Schrodinger’s cat of crime mysteries.
While I don’t think the movie is a masterpiece, I do think it is masterful. And there are so many fantastic scenes. The acting is impeccable. Sandra Hüller and the young actor playing her son, Milo Machado-Graner, were just pitch-perfect in every scene.
The movie feels utterly contemporary and ranges over various twenty-first century subject matter like gender roles in relationships, how immigrants are viewed within their adopted cultures and how the nature of literature is changing (the meaning of autofiction is seminal to the plot). And then this movie has several timeless themes like the stain of guilt and the compromises love must always make.
I applaud the director’s choice not to decide whether a murder has been committed. Justine Triet stated in an interview she had decided she would not know “the answer.” The lead actor said as much too; she had also made the same non-decision. This latter decision is even more metaphysically puzzling. How can someone without cognitive dysfunction not know her own history? But this is a character. So perhaps she does not exist in the same time-continuum as a physical human being? Maybe we are really in a book, a work of autofiction, and not an actual life? From where is this story beaming at us? Anatomy of a Fall is a movie about nescience. The director doesn’t know the truth. The actor does not know. The audience doesn’t know.
But the audience will argue this one out, mostly online. And they have strong opinions. I see a lot of drift towards the idea that her son chose to force himself to believe in her innocence (possibly against his own natural belief in her guilt). People generally agree that the testimony he gives near the end of the trial was almost certainly concocted. He’s lying to save her. Or else he has altered his own memories of what happened, to save her. A clever comment I saw online pointed out that at the beginning of the movie he struggles to play a particular piece of music on the piano. By the end, he is able to play it flawlessly. He has begun to compose his life. He has learned the way life must be structured in order to proceed, to go forward and past the impossible thing which has happened. The question is whether art is artifice. This is a big theme in the movie. When the husband transcribes his life, his “autofiction” is rejected by a publisher as artless. Yet his wife is able to transmute the story of her life into art. Is this because she is better at artifice? This could explain how she is able to change a murder into a suicide. She is using her skill as an artist to work dark magic. Or is Samuel’s death a result of this inequality in art, in power? Is this why she succeeds at living, while he dies (perhaps actually a suicide)? The film is very French indeed. This is how contemporary French novels often operate, loving indeterminacy and doubt in language and leaving plot stranded beyond any final redemption.
But let’s say this was a straightforward crime drama. Then I would write this ending below, which is admittedly terrible if you are seeking the wonderful ambiguity of Justine Triet, but potentially useful if you want everything answered. Spoiler alert was given above but if you haven’t watched the movie, the following will potentially spoil even more of your viewing experience.
SINCE THE MOVIE LOVES FLASHBACKS
When Sandra is finally alone after her acquittal, we have a flashback in her mind to the day on which the film begins. The camera begins in the downstairs room where she is seated at the interview with her young visitor.
Both of the women are distracted by the incredibly loud music being played upstairs, ostensibly by Samuel. But now we are seeing the interview play out without sound at all as the camera rises up and passes through the ceiling and next level (in cinematic cutaway) to the third floor where we finally see Samuel, lying on the floor, already dead, bludgeoned.
The interview has been scheduled and must be conducted. The loud music dooming the interview was a ruse to get the young woman to leave so that Sandra might continue to clean up the real crime scene and stage the false scene.
As soon as the young woman leaves, Sandra returns to the third floor and manages to lug the body to the window and cast him down to earth. But none of this sequence is actually shown. Seeing him lying dead on the third floor explains the sequence of events that must have necessarily followed.
The drag marks in the snow could indicate she tinkered with placement of Samuel’s body post-fall. If her footprints in the snow would have been problematic, then perhaps Samuel had been just barely alive still. Perhaps he did indeed crawl those last few feet from where he landed. Possibly the interviewer arrived at the front door in the moments immediately following the bludgeoning. Maybe Sandra had to abandon Samuel in a state of extreme incapacity, near death, unable to move. Probably she had suggested the long dog walk to her son and knew the amount of time it would take him to return back to their house.
I think it’s clear the son knows in short order that his mother has committed a murder but he struggles with accepting this. It’s the horrible things he hears in court about his parent’s relationship and their brutality to each other which allow him to decide to be the means by which his mother achieves some theoretical future redemption. The kiss on the top of her head at the end of the movie indicates somewhat of a role reversal. I think ultimately what helps him to decide how to proceed is hearing his mother’s thoughts about his disability and weighing them against his father’s bleaker view of this same disability (arguably caused by the father, if blamelessly). Something in her character speaks to something in his character. Perhaps he senses her strength is what he will need in his life rather than his father’s sort of protective love which will always see him as vulnerable and somewhat pathetic.
Of course, this all relates back to the pivotal scene where Daniel begs the guardian to tell him whether she thinks his mother is guilty or innocent. She refuses to say and tells him it is up to him to decide. He says he cannot. The guardian then tells Daniel that when one cannot live in a state of agonized doubt, one must decide to decide, whether one is right or wrong. She is clearly trying to help the child to achieve sanity (and adulthood).
It’s interesting that I think we see the son in the process of becoming a writer. Because it seems the “scene” with father and son in the car on the ride to the veterinarian’s office, the flashback scene he narrates at the trial, is a total invention, scripted by the son himself. He understands how to write autofiction now. Perhaps he is a quick learner and has picked it up from the “meta” nature of the trial and its linguistic games played as cat-and-mouse legal proceedings. It’s clear he feels this is empowering. It’s offering a form of salvation for his mother and him, if a confected one. But it’s also teaching him the process, that he will only have power if he enters the game of language and manipulates the power structures by which it polices.
We are left at the end with a changed power dynamic in the mother-son relationship. Because it appears Sandra only begins to really allow herself to feel the horror of her crime once she knows she has escaped justice. Now the judgment will continue in her mind and soul. We see that in the scene in the restaurant where she tries to continue the new romance with her lawyer but suddenly a wall comes between them. She closes herself off and goes inward. The son has been her savior but she has no savior. When she lies on the couch in the final scene and the dog comes to her, it is an animal comfort. Her son is separated from her then. This final image is both comforting and disturbing. The dog represents the ultimate innocence, the animal innocence in us. We seek warmth and comfort from another body. Sandra’s smile of relief at this acceptance has a pathos about it. For a moment she feels instead of thinks. She is grateful and lost. The movie ends in Purgatory.
