The movie that directly inspired the closing scene of ‘Anatomy of a Fall’
The courtroom drama, legal thriller, and investigative procedural are three genres in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to tread narrative ground that hasn’t been walked before. However, Anatomy of a Fall still felt like a breath of fresh air that injected new life into all three.
Co-written and directed by Justine Triet, the French-language feature has already become a firm awards season favourite. It recently added a Golden Globe for ‘Best Picture – Non-English Language’ to a trophy cabinet that already included the Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival, with Anatomy of a Fall firmly in the driving seat to secure an Academy Award for ‘Best International Feature Film’.
Sandra Hüller stars as Sandra Voyter, who finds herself as the chief suspect when her husband plummets to his death from an upper window of their remote mountain home. As more evidence begins to mount that isn’t in her favour, her blind son Daniel becomes a pivotal part of the ongoing investigation, plunging him into the thick of a moral conundrum when his mother takes the stand.
The ending ultimately finds Sandra acquitted of the murder, leaving Daniel nervous about her impending arrival home. Signing off on a quiet, introspective note, the bombast of the courtroom sequences is followed by an intimate family moment, which saw Triet revisit a string of classics for inspiration.
In an interview with Picturehouses, the director admitted that she “rewatched a lot of courtroom dramas” but pinpointed Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion for how “the scene of the closing argument was very useful to me”. Even though, in her own words, “I don’t love the film”, one aspect of its own final reel left a mark.
The 1959 crime story finds two students commit a murder they deemed to be flawless until key evidence discovered at the scene brings them to trial. Orson Welles plays a famed lawyer who tries to save the pair from being sentenced to death, making a grandstanding final statement to save them from execution.
Reflecting on how the legendary actor and filmmaker played the smaller moments, she praised how it acted as “the opposite of the loud, virile voice that would take all the space”. David Fincher’s Gone Girl was another point of contact, with Triet offering that the movie “has haunted me for ten years”.
In a similar vein to Compulsion, though, she loved it “only partially”, with Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, and Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler also singled out for influencing Anatomy of a Fall in a number of different ways. In the end, the result is unmistakably a product of Triet’s vision and nobody else’s. However, it helps to have such a litany of thematically-similar predecessors to revisit in the throes of creativity.
