Category: Reviews

Film: Anatomy of a Fall. Director Justine Triet. 2023

With high chances of getting an Oscar and having won the Palme D’Or the film deserves some special attention. It is definitely of higher quality than some recent Cannes awardees. It does not merit descriptions like “thriller” of “court drama” even though it strives to be one.

Its failure of checking the boxes for court drama has been discussed already (in The New Yorker.) The part of it that explores the husband/wife conflict is probably its most banal aspect – there is a rivalry between the husband and the wife, the husband is of course the less successful one, he is week, he is jealous of his wife’s success, he is to blame for the child’s accident – too many cliches in one place to make up for an original analysis of a relationship gone wrong. The forensic aspect (angles of “the fall” being examined) does not really become relevant in the film – it is just the director playing the “court drama” part. The blind child as the unreliable witness - really?

Its failure of checking the boxes for court drama has been discussed already (in The New Yorker.) The part of it that explores the husband/wife conflict is probably its most banal aspect – there is a rivalry between the husband and the wife, the husband is of course the less successful one, he is week, he is jealous of his wife’s success, he is to blame for the child’s accident – too many cliches in one place to make up for an original analysis of a relationship gone wrong. The forensic aspect (angles of “the fall” being examined) does not really become relevant in the film – it is just the director playing the “court drama” part. The blind child as the unreliable witness - really?

It gradually becomes clear to the viewer that they are not going to get a clear answer in the who-done-it situation. And that is the most important feature of the film – its original conclusion. The child is made to realize that the world of the adults is complicated, that there is no real “truth” about who is to blame in a Fall – symbolically speaking. He realizes that he needs to “choose” what he is going to believe has happened since he would not be able to understand what has actually happened. The son choses to save his mother. And he does so by providing the decisive testimony that exonerates her. The final sequence of the film is its best – we see a tired mother, a deeply, existentially tired human being forever locking inside a secret impossible to ever share, embracing her child. A bond that transcends truth.

The best thing about this film is Sandra Huller’s performance. Formidable!

The Rachel Incident. A Novel by Caroline O’Donoghue.2023

I have not had a more enjoyable reading recently. The initial impression was of a cool witty language that would dominate the experience of reading the book but it soon became more than a captivating exercise in style.

It won me over with the best description of a book launch that was at the same time funny, cruel, and realistic. It captured the pathetic and the sublime in this culminating moment of an author’s experience and the ridiculous anticlimax in the encounter with their first audience.

The book has an original plot – it follows the dynamics of a love triangle of sorts but it is the triangle of a girl and her three archetypal lovers: the Teacher, the Friend and the Lover. Thus it allows the author to dissect the nature of adolescent desire or love – the combination of the erotic appeal of the intellectual, the platonic homo-erotic intimacy with the confidante, and the purely sexual attraction to the elusive man. The main character Rachel struggles her way to maturity by gradually sorting out the nature of her attractions and setting herself free from the first two along the way. But in retrospect, the time of her entanglement and confusing affinities with the three men is the happiest time of her life when love is diffuse and all-consuming before it becomes tamed and is channeled to culminate in a marriage.

O’Donoghue is a master of detail and the ability to capture the undercurrents of a scene. The one-liners can be smart and witty and dirty but are also vehicles of an underlying melancholy, the melancholy of growing up and fitting in.

She has more literary substance than some bearers of literary awards.