MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The courtroom drama "Anatomy Of A Fall," about a woman accused of her husband's murder, won this year's top award at the Cannes Film Festival. France is entering a different film for the Oscars' best international feature, but our critic Bob Mondello says that is no excuse to let "Anatomy Of A Fall" fall through the cracks.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: High in the French Alps, Sandra, a novelist, is being interviewed.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ANATOMY OF A FALL")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) You say your books always mix truth and fiction, and that makes us want to figure out which is which.
MONDELLO: When Sandra's husband Samuel, a less successful novelist, starts blasting music upstairs, the song's on a loop. Sensory overload for Danny, their almost blind 11-year-old son, who grabs the dog's leash and heads out for a walk. Though the journalist tries to keep the interview going...
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) I have many, many questions.
MONDELLO: ...She soon gives up, leaving Sandra on her own as the music keeps throbbing. It's still throbbing when Danny comes back from the walk to find his dad lying in a pool of blood in the snow.
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MILO MACHADO GRANER: (As Daniel) Mother. Mother.
MONDELLO: Did he fall, or was he pushed? That is the question. And to Sandra's growing concern, no one's taking the fall side of the equation very seriously, including her own lawyer, who wonders whether Samuel had been depressed.
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SWANN ARLAUD: (As Maitre Vincent Renzi) It's probably our best defense. I mean, if they indict you, it's our only defense.
SANDRA HULLER: (As Sandra Voyter) But I think he fell.
ARLAUD: (As Maitre Vincent Renzi) Yeah, but nobody's going to believe that. I don't believe that.
MONDELLO: Director Justine Triet parcels out the revelations slowly. Sandra is so guarded, as played by Sandra Huller, that it's hard to read her, even when she's being interrogated in court by a smirking, insinuating prosecutor...
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ANTOINE REINARTZ: (As Avocat General, speaking French).
MONDELLO: ...Who has a recording of the couple arguing shortly before Samuel died.
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HULLER: (As Sandra Voyter) He recorded conversations, Daniel's piano lessons, and sometimes just himself - talking to himself. And I think he did that because he wanted to gather material to help him start writing again. Now, with hindsight, it seems possible that he could have provoked this fight just to record it.
MONDELLO: The filmmaker allows these details to emerge in the courtroom in full view, as it were, of Danny, who will be the witness on whose testimony the trial will turn. Danny's learning a lot about his parents at a tender age - about the blame and guilt surrounding the accident that left him blind, about their dueling careers as writers, about an affair with a court-appointed guardian living in the house. Sandra is distressed about not being able to comfort her son, though she finds nonverbal ways, when, say, he's taking his stress out on their piano and she sits beside him to gently lead him to Chopin.
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MONDELLO: What's on trial, it sometimes seems, isn't so much the death of a man as the death of a marriage. Also, the strength of a filmmaker - Triet gets a sharp, enigmatic performance from Huller, who leaps from French to English, searching for words to match the thoughts so evidently flashing in her eyes. And also from preteen, Milo Machado Graner, on whose shoulders rest much of the suspense concerning what the court will say about Sandra's guilt or innocence. In a film this nuanced, that's not a question that can be easily answered with a verdict, however thoughtfully arrived at. In fact, it's a question likely enough to pursue you out of the theater that you may want to see "Anatomy Of A Fall" with someone who enjoys a good debate. I'm Bob Mondello.
(SOUNDBITE OF BENOIT DANIEL'S "VARIATION AUTOUR D'UN PRELUDE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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