A procedure can be much more than a form, a structure or a way of doing things. The way of doing things determines, depending on the cases, the thing and even the cause itself. A trial, for example, is much more than simply the presentation of the reasons for and against an alleged crime to reach a conclusion or sentence. A judgment is also a ceremony (a form) that aspires to represent truth itself. He knows himself to be imperfect by definition, since he can only attest to the versions of those involved to at most imagine what really happened, but he acts before his audience (society) with a pageantry of togas, oaths and harsh prose as if he himself. god (or the sovereign people in its secular version) was present. Well looked at, that and no other is the very meaning of art. It is about shaping life itself to represent the truth and nothing but the truth. Then there is another art whose mission is to destroy that form and denounce it as the deception that it is, but that also requires its rite (iconoclastic in this case) and its form, which is nothing more than the destruction of forms.
‘Anatomy of a fall’ It is a refined example of the preceding paragraph and, furthermore, a perfect illustration of the importance of precisely the form. It starts from a serious event: the death of a man who appears collapsed at the foot of a window. The man is a husband and, also, a father. It all seems like a coincidence. In fact, almost everything in life is at first nothing more than the product of chance animated by hidden forces until the order of causalities gives it meaning. Soon doubts will appear and, with them, indications, evidence and even guilt. Was it suicide or murder? If the first, what led the victim to do it? Could he have been motivated by deeper reasons and ended up being responsible for someone else’s suicide? If the latter, can there be an excuse for the most extreme and unjustifiable of acts? Can the innocent be guilty and vice versa?
The film is organized around a trial; the trial of the wife and, furthermore, mother. And from there it entertains itself, as criminal proceedings themselves do, in representing the truth. In reality, the film itself is nothing more than the representation of the representation of the truth that is the trial. It sounds labyrinthine and, indeed, it is. A hypnotic and proverbial labyrinth. As well as terribly absorbing and a little distressing. The entire film, hand in hand with a script that is more than just perfect and supported by the enormous performance of Sandra Hüller, does nothing more than investigate and reveal the tense and somewhat (not so much) subtle threads that support that What we believe is reality. Suddenly, each of the certainties that make up what we call life as a couple are discussed as the impostures they probably are.
Triet succeeds in composing a film whose content is itself the form. And backwards. When discussing things as obvious as machismo or as lyrical-structural as heteropatriarchy, we are actually talking about forms, about representations, about the procedures that determine things, cases and causes. The form is the argument, the aesthetics are the same ethics. What falls to the ground from the top of an adorable and very alpine house is not only the body of a man. The illusion of happiness and normality that had a form of life together, a form of truth, also collapses.
The director manages to create the starkest autopsy of a couple that is not necessarily decomposing. Any other (mine, even) is fine. It gives the impression that it is simply a matter of dissecting the wound left in a writer, academic and husband by seeing how his wife has something that he is far from possessing (talent to write and courage to carry out without fuss what he wants). ), but not. Little by little, the instruction of the case, which is also the instruction of the film itself (representation of representation, we said), becomes before the eyes of the viewer something much more substantial, universal and not at all anecdotal. The form concerns us all, the form is everything. We are simply what makes us. Pure formality then.