Photo: NEON

Photo: A24

Anatomy of a Fall/Anatomie d’une chute

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Justine Triet

The Zone of Interest

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Jonathan Glazer

Few actors in recent memory have had as vivid a year to showcase their particular strengths as Sandra Hüller in 2023. Aside from perhaps Léa Seydoux in both of the past two years, whose roles (for the better) generally resided in films with too divergent receptions/profiles to totally register as a unified statement, the last true occurrence of this was with Isabelle Huppert in 2016, with the perfectly contrasting Elle and Things to Come, and even she didn’t have her films taking the two top prizes at Cannes and getting big theatrical releases from the two most overtly influential US distributors right now.

If Elle acted as the archetypal ice queen role for Huppert and Things to Come as a relatively uncommon display of quotidian warmth for an actor decades into one of the most formidable oeuvres that a performer has ever assembled, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest operate less as tonal opposites than as distinctly different views of what it means to center a performance. Hüller, for her part, has less of a track record than either Huppert or the younger Seydoux — her hitherto most prominent performance in Maren Ade’s comic masterpiece Toni Erdmann — which makes her sudden return to the spotlight all the more gratifying.

Triet has been a director of great interest to me for a number of years, with both of her Virginie Efira vehicles — Victoria (2016) and Sibyl (2019), with the latter featuring Hüller in one of the great unsung supporting performances of the past five years — demonstrating a canny understanding of romantic woes and the way they can become enmeshed in the courtroom (in the former) and the film set (in the latter). For his part, Glazer is a filmmaker I’ve appreciated without ever truly embracing; my memories of Sexy Beast are mostly limited to its flashy style and flashier performances, while Under the Skin struck me as unnerving and confident without coming close to its consensus status as a transcendent journey into the unknown.

So my love for these films, likely the strongest of their respective director’s careers thus far, can’t (and shouldn’t) be entirely separated from Hüller and the disparate means by which she grounds them. But this isn’t to take away from each film’s considerable merits, and the sizable breaks from my previous conception of what their auteurs are capable of. Anatomy of a Fall lies closer to that view: like Victoria, it is principally a courtroom drama, with Hüller as an autofiction writer (suggestively also named Sandra) on trial for the murder by defenestration of her novelist husband at their chalet in the French Alps. The Zone of Interest, meanwhile, is Glazer’s first period piece, tackling a time and space which at first glance feels more well-trod than any from his past films: Auschwitz, or rather, the manicured estate of camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Hüller), and their many children, with the Jewish victims out of sight and (to the residents) mostly out of mind.

One of the under-discussed aspects thus far of Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest lies in their structures, which when paired together almost form mirror images. The former shifts from the couple’s beautiful snowy mountain dwelling to a bland courtroom a third of the way through and rarely departs — not unlike Alice Diop’s more overtly rigorous Saint Omer, another French courtroom film about motivation, extended testimony, and cultural mores — while the latter somewhat unexpectedly moves from bucolic green Polish riversides to harsh wintry Berlin at roughly the three-quarters point, placing the barely glimpsed, often-heard genocide on the other side of Höss’s wall at a much greater, more blatantly statistical distance. This twinned series of departures alone complicates what might seem (and already has been construed) to be films easily reduced to their loglines, carrying little variation or depth after said premises are established. I bring up this last point not to criticize any of my fellow peers — indeed, while I love it considerably more than Triet’s film, Anatomy of a Fall strikes me in a good way as the greatest achievement in middlebrow filmmaking since Drive My Car, with all the possible attendant criticisms that such a filmmaking categorization attracts — but to convey something of the slipperiness of both films in both the execution and in any attempt to nail down exactly what each is doing. For both films are, at their core, about the fallout from committing to (and/or deluding oneself into believing) a narrative.

Like Triet’s most obvious antecedents, Basic Instinct and Anatomy of a Murder — though Luc Moullet and Antonietta Pizzorno’s Anatomy of a Relationship might be an even more fitting predecessor/title inspiration — Anatomy of a Fall courts this literary inclination explicitly. One of the chief points of contention in the battle that develops between Sandra’s friend and defense attorney Vincent (a terrifically blithe Swann Arlaud) and the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz, as captivatingly needling as he was in 120 BPM with none of the earnestness) lies in the interpretation of various texts, given that the only beings in the vicinity of the chalet were the couple’s son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), blind from an accident that happened under his father Samuel’s (Samuel Theis) watch, and their adorable dog Snoop. Such texts run along a spectrum between personal and impersonal: a passage from one of Sandra’s novels which found its consensual genesis in one of Samuel’s many abandoned projects; the astonishingly catchy instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” that Samuel blasted to disrupt an impromptu interview Sandra was giving shortly before his demise, where the original’s “misogynistic” lyrics are dismissed as too remote from the recording that was actually deployed; and most crucially of all the surreptitious recording of Sandra and Samuel’s final fight, made by the latter a day before he plunged from his domicile, which is only partially visually dramatized before moving back to the “objectivity” of the courtroom, a process that Sandra characterizes as honing in on one isolated incident and using it to inaccurately characterize a much more complex relationship.

In this and many other instances, Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari (her partner and director of the great, similarly conventional Onoda) do lean into a certain obviousness with respect to the calculated ambiguity of these and other objects, placeholders for lack of direct proof. But the decisive moment arrives early on: Sandra claims to Vincent shortly after the incident that she believes Samuel’s death was truly accidental, not the product of a despondent suicide or a heated quarrel; Vincent bluntly tells her that neither he nor the court will seriously consider such a possibility. From then on, the idea is completely dropped, but its conspicuous absence remains in the viewer’s mind, even as Sandra is forced for self-preservation’s sake to abandon it. All her actions from that point on — whether she did it or not, whether she ever actually believed what she said — are necessarily driven by a commitment to a certain path. In the face of all the rigors of the trial process, with its distortions and equivocations on both sides, and the media — largely represented with some wonderfully garish camera footage also used to capture segments of the police investigation/reenactment of the day, a particularly deft way to hammer home the performative, mediated roles for detective and reporter alike — Sandra must stand firm; it’s only fitting that, after the conclusion of the trial, the film does not climax so much as fade out, a long exhale as the emotional detritus of the past few years floods back into view once again.

For The Zone of Interest, the commitment to a delusion happened long before the first image of a family picnic, before the black-screen overture set to Mica Levi’s droning score. It is historical, embedded in ideas of Aryan supremacy instilled in Höss and his family via both interior and exterior forces, something that presumably every viewer of this film will be aware of before it starts. Glazer’s project, then, is to explore the ramifications of that mindset, to depict the perverse normalcy involved in a daily existence next to one of the most infernal machines ever devised; it’s certainly not for nothing that one of the few scenes of Höss actually working comes in a meeting he has with two engineers who have traveled to present their ingenious new design for an incinerator with multiple chambers, so that the process of burning corpses and dumping their ashes can proceed that much more efficiently.

Such a ghastly mental image and the professional compliments accompanying it come to sum up much of The Zone of Interest, whose title — the film is adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, which I haven’t read, though reports seem to indicate that this largely eschews much of that book’s narrative — itself gestures at both bureaucratic detachment and an ominous foreboding. In turn, that describes the general form of the film: captured on a multitude of hidden cameras that captured continuous action, the images feel ever-so-slightly off, whether by dint of their angle, the slightly lower resolution than the norm for digital cinematography in 2023, or the sometimes jagged editing patterns. Signal moments do develop out of this aesthetic: upon returning from work one day, Höss orders a servant to take and wash his boots; the cameras stay outside of the house, observing the servant hard at work at an outdoor spigot, before abruptly cutting to an overhead view of the blood flowing from the boot for less than a second.

But the deliberate limits of The Zone of Interest‘s areas of observation largely lead Glazer to operate by allusion, which becomes Hüller’s key function; while the “character development,” such as it is, belongs to Höss, Hedwig is just as vital a figure for understanding Glazer’s ultimate aims. The house includes a tastefully kept garden ringed by barbed wire, and it can be understood that, since the film never ventures inside the concentration camp itself, the viewer’s perception of Hedwig’s work — inside and outside, dreadfully mundane and aesthetically pleasing alike — overlaps the work that her husband is doing right next door. Her means of cultivation is abetted by his toil towards destruction, a self-sustaining loop as logical and sickening as the revolving incinerator. The journey round-and-round is only interrupted by Höss’s relocation to Berlin and a series of interludes, shot on thermal cameras, which show a young Polish girl furtively leaving food around the camp and retrieving a song written by an inmate. That ghostly image is all the resistance that can be found, at least until a coda that brings the weight of history down upon Höss, alone in the halls of power.

Hüller is left out of that personal reckoning, just as the construction of Anatomy of a Fall‘s denouement forestalls the kind of catharsis that might be found in a different sort of courtroom drama. To return to the sterling linkage between these two films, Hüller in Anatomy is called upon to essentially carry the film; for all of the excellent performances and destabilizing, searching camera movements (sometimes appearing to emulate courtroom videography, crash zooms and quick pans included) and scene constructions, it likely could not hold together without her particular screen presence, a composure and confidence that always feels on the edge of breaking apart. The deft establishment of Sandra’s shaky command of French, frequently forcing her to switch to English (a lingua franca still removed from her native German), acts as yet another way in which she is situated as an outsider in this fight for her own life, and much of the pleasure of the film comes from watching a brilliant woman with everything to lose attempt to navigate the labyrinth of law and society, of judicious rejoinders and earnest appeals, constructed so that the underlying misgivings are never forgotten. Zone, on the other hand, takes all of that poise and removes the raw emotions undergirding them, leaving a surface without any depth, an automaton moving through her carefully practiced quotidian paces. Yet it is a surface that I am very familiar with; it’s potentially not too outlandish to call this a particularly odd form of a star vehicle, where seeing an actor I deeply admire cast “against type” as a thoroughly detestable character deepens the oddity and discomfort of the experience. Watching Hüller navigate a very different set of mazes — spatial and moral — making every right turn in the former and every wrong turn in the latter, lends its own strange charge to the proceedings. While one character’s judgment remains open and the other’s is hammered away, the lingering impacts of both, separately and together, still carry a tremendous force.