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    ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Review: Tumbling From the Alps to the Courtroom

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    Did a writer kill her husband? In this cerebral murder trial drama by the director Justine Triet, the audience never has its footing and questions go unanswered.“Anatomy of a Fall,” a cerebral trial drama by the director Justine Triet, opens with a mysterious death in the French Alps. The deceased is an aspiring writer named Samuel (Samuel Theis). The suspect is his more successful wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a novelist who is a lot like her surroundings: stoic, remote and a tad frosty.Did Sandra kill her husband? As the film flows from investigation to tribunal to verdict, it’s only interested in the question — not the answer. Triet and her fellow screenwriter (and real-life partner) Arthur Harari invite a jury to dissect the flaws of a rather average woman. Sandra drinks, but she’s not a drunk. She’s aloof, but not cruel. She needs sex, but she’s hardly the aggressor the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) describes.Her most confounding trait is, if you believe her testimony, an ability to nap while Samuel spends his last living hour replaying a cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” at a volume so earsplitting the steel drums could have triggered an avalanche. The closest anyone comes to a motive is when Sandra’s inquisitors suggest that she was annoyed by the song’s misogynist lyrics. Her lawyer (Saadia Bentaïeb) counters: “It was an instrumental version.”All people are unknowable, the film insists, even to themselves. If any of us were forced to defend our incongruities and fibs — the fights we avoid, the compromises that make us quietly seethe — we’d all be convicted of irreconcilable contradictions. (Still a lesser crime than murder.) Sandra just has to confess her inner frictions to a courtroom where her rationalizations hang in the air as goofily as circus balloons.The film doesn’t need to spend two and a half hours intoning that life is an anthology of competing narratives, that every marriage is made of two storytellers. But at least it finds a few ways to drum on the idea, most resonantly through Sandra and Samuel’s books, which draw their inspiration from a blend of biography and fiction (as did the lead in Triet’s last film, “Sibyl,” another author disastrously mining reality). That blur, notes a student (Camille Rutherford) who interviews Sandra for her thesis in the first scene, “makes us want to figure out which is which.” Sandra smiles at the challenge. Later, however, her freedom will hinge on how a jury parses her truth from others’ interpretations.As experts take the stand to insist that their version of events is correct, the cinematographer, Simon Beaufils, switches from a composed style to one that zips and zooms, like an on-the-fly documentarian. Watching a witness parry questions from both the prosecution and defense, the image holds on him while the camera sprints back and forth to keep pace with the arguments lobbing from each side. The whiplash is dizzying.The most important judge in the room is the couple’s preteen son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Partly blind because of an accident that figures into the case, Daniel is uncomfortable becoming a character in the lawyers’ competing narratives. His poor vision is a metaphor for the struggle to see the truth. A more poetic allusion is how the boy teaches himself piano — not by reading sheet music, but by discovering through trial and error which notes sound right. As a bonus, we hear the passage of time in his improvement.Triet’s filmmaking style is deliberate, an unusual approach for a story about ambiguity. She wants the viewer to decide Sandra’s guilt — she even has a minor character say so outright — and so she withholds both the answer and the pleasure of feeling like we can figure out. Even Hüller, the kind of earthy and sincere actor who builds her characters out from the spine, has admitted that she isn’t sure if Sandra did it.In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration — or appreciating the humor of this year’s Cannes jury definitively awarding her film the Palme d’Or. I’ve gone back to study some scenes and believe Triet knows what happened on the mountain. But she’s also added feints and discrepancies that go unacknowledged, vexations that exist solely for the audience. These are secrets Triet shares only with us and the dead man. And I suspect she’s taking them to the grave.Anatomy of a FallRated R for language and violent images. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle’ Review: Following Orders, for Decades

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      Arthur Harari’s film dramatizes the true story of a Japanese officer who continued the fight for 29 years after the Imperial Army’s surrender in World War II.On Aug. 15, 1945, Japan’s wartime emperor, Hirohito, announced the Imperial Japanese Army’s surrender to the Allied Forces in World War II. But for 29 years after this announcement, an officer, Hiroo Onoda, continued to wage war on Lubang Island in the Philippines. The striking film “Onoda” dramatizes the true story of this holdout who persisted for decades after there ceased to be an enemy.Appropriately, “Onoda” moves slowly through its central character’s life story. Onoda (played as a young man by Yuya Endo, with Kanji Tsuda as his older iteration) begins the film as a failed kamikaze pilot, whose life is given purpose by the highhanded Major Taniguchi (Issey Ogata). Taniguchi recruits Onoda to undertake a secret mission, one that Onoda must never surrender. In return, Taniguchi promises that wherever his men go, they will not be abandoned.It’s this promise that fuels Onoda’s faith in the jungles. After the American army decimates the forces on Lubang Island, Onoda becomes the leader of a group of four remaining soldiers. Based on his belief, the group waits for the major’s return, facing rain, starvation and the increasingly bewildered defenses of local Filipino farmers.Despite the film’s wartime setting, there is little talk of politics — in fact, there is little talking at all. Instead, the director, Arthur Harari, chooses to create a psychological portrait of his central character, using images rather than explanations of ideology to tap into Onoda’s mind-set. In training, Taniguchi’s shirt glows titanium white. Sunlight seems to strike faces like a spotlight. The unnatural, painterly quality of the film’s training sequences makes their impression indelible. The light provides wordless, and conveniently apolitical, explanation for why a person might endure nearly three decades (or in cinematic terms, nearly three hours) without action.Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the JungleNot rated. In Japanese and Filipino, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 53 minutes. In theaters. More