Anatomy of a Fall Is About Marriage — But Also About the Trials of Being an Expat
Everyone wants to talk about Anatomy of a Fall as a dissection of marriage: the impossibility of relationships, the petty one-upmanship that infects so many of our connections with the people we love most (or used to love most), illustrated most beautifully and plainly in the opening scene, when “German bisexual novelist Sandra Voyter” (per Wikipedia) sees her quasi-flirty afternoon with a journalist interrupted by her husband, Samuel, playing a cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” as loudly as possible. (That it is a steel-drum calypso cover only heightens the insult.) But it is not only this low-simmering grievance, or Sandra’s bisexuality, so often pushed to the fore as a personal quality of extreme dubiousness. (Why wouldn’t a bisexual woman kill her husband??? duh????), that functions as a presentation of guilt. It is her Germanness — more specifically, her non-Frenchness — that gives the film so much of its antagonistic shimmer. What do we know about Sandra? We know, as above, she is a bisexual German novelist. Now, the film (and obviously director Justine Triet) is well aware that …
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