by Christos Zabounis

While the 96th Academy Awards focused on the big winner “Oppenheimer”, the film’s director Christopher Nolan and star Cillian Murphy, a French film that had shone at the 76th Festival de Cannes, winning the Palme d’Or , awarded for her original screenplay. With a budget of just 6.2 million euros, “Anatomy of a Fall”, in addition to enthusiastic critical reception, rose to No. 1 at the French box office and set box office records abroad.

It is a legal thriller, starring a writer – played by the wonderful Sandra Hüller – who “discovers” her husband’s body one morning at the entrance to their chalet. The Police arrest her as the prime suspect given the couple’s quarrels before the murder – or suicide, as she claims.

Inspired by other police report cases, the original screenplay was written by director Justine Triet and her partner Arthur Harari, during the first quarantine. “We were writing in two different rooms and emailing each other,” Triet said in a recent interview. After all, the relations between the two sexes are at the center of the film work. The man’s fall from the balcony is the opening symbolism for the deeper examination of the couple’s fall. Their child will be the central figure in the unraveling of the mystery, because that’s what it’s all about. The existential question of what everyone gives and what they take in their lives, domestic violence, professional impasses, infidelity, even the son’s disability, are represented with a rare mastery and depth, so one understands why the film wanted the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and, before that, the Golden Globes.