Last year’s big international award-winner (even Cannes dropped their usual contrarian ways for it) is at heart a domestic murder mystery, a classy ‘did she or didn’t she’ tale of a wife, a husband, a son & a dog thrown into legal turmoil when the husband dies in a fall. Suicide? Accident? Murder? With only circumstantial evidence on a case that quickly captures the public’s imagination, social/political/moral bias is forced to stand in for facts. And while writer/director Justine Triet spins this out to a satisfying, even logical conclusion, with dramatically deft stops for bombshell court surprises (no, the dog doesn’t testify . . . well, not directly, but an audio tape of pitched battle between husband & wife does), you might wonder what all the fuss was about on a story Alan J. Pakula might have optioned for development in the ‘80s.* The answer comes in the setting. Not the French Alps where the family has relocated, but in the psychological terroir of an Ingmar Bergman film like SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE/’74 which ups the courtroom drama tropes. As wife/mom/main suspect, Sandra Hüller is an alarmingly chilly creation, laughing to cover up awkward moments (and she’s all awkward moments); a successful writer of semi-autobiographical books her late husband would have given his soul to write; as teasingly intimate with her stylish lawyer as she is distant from the young woman who helps at home and has an easier relationship with the hearing disabled son than she does. That sightly ‘off’ feeling has you questioning your own feelings . . . or is it bias? But for the case, not the film.
DOUBLE-BILL: *The Pakula film is PRESUMED INNOCENT/’90, currently streaming in a new, much expanded remake. Something of a bumper crop of these stories at the time.
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