Just how many times can one woman endure an instrumental cover of a 50 Cent hit before murder crosses her mind?
It's one of the many mysteries running through the riveting Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet's Palme d'Or-winning — and newly Oscar-nominated — French thriller about a writer who finds herself on trial for the alleged murder of her husband.
Best actress nominee Sandra Hüller plays 40-ish German novelist Sandra Voyter, a writer of some renown whose talents — essential to the movie's tango with the truth — extend to drawing upon elements of her life for her fiction.
As the film opens, Sandra is sitting for an interview with a student journalist (Camille Rutherford) in the remote French chalet she shares with her husband Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), their visually impaired 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) and his guide dog, a very charming and perceptive border collie by the name of Snoop.
Midway through this casual, almost flirtatious conversation, the interview is drowned out by the loud, looping sound of Samuel blasting — of all things — a German funk band's instrumental cover of 50 Cent's 2003 smash P.I.M.P. from the upstairs attic. (Snoop would presumably approve.)
Triet had wanted to use Dolly Parton's Jolene, but couldn't afford the rights. Still, it's impossible to imagine anything but the song she ended up with — its steel-drum calypso sound sits in absurd contrast to the movie's wintry chill, playing as both an intimation of doom and a kind of recurring laugh track.
Later that day, Daniel and Snoop return from a walk to discover Samuel's bloodied body in the snow at the foot of the house, having tumbled from the attic window to his death.
Did Samuel fall? Was he pushed? Could he — a frustrated writer living in the shadow of his partner's success — have thrown himself off the precipice?
It's not long before the authorities have encircled the chalet — and Sandra is charged with her husband's murder.
Triet, who co-wrote the screenplay with her partner Arthur Harari, loves the kind of complex, often cruel characters who would never find themselves in an inspirational Netflix category.
Her previous film, Sibyl (also starring Hüller), relished the hot mess of a psychiatrist who used privileged client information to garnish her novel in progress and wound up embroiled in an affair with the client's movie-star boyfriend.
In Anatomy of a Fall, she and Hüller craft a rich, full-bodied portrait of a woman far beyond the familiar trope of the wrongly accused innocent. Our sympathy may gravitate towards Sandra, but she's also a slippery centre to a film that isn't interested in taking the easy path.
Thanks to Hüller's skillful, inscrutable performance, we're left to wonder whether this clever, highly intelligent novelist isn't putting her aptitude for blurring the facts to sinister use.
"My job is to cover the tracks," Sandra once said to the press, "so fiction can destroy reality."
It's a philosophy that Triet loves, too. When she's not obscuring Sandra behind onlookers and vulture-like prosecutors during the trial, she goes in tight on Hüller's face — her ice-blue eyes, the shape of her mouth — as though daring us to disassemble the woman, to unmatch her voice from her features and question the truth of her words.
As the trial plays out, the revelations pile up about Sandra and Samuel's frosty marriage and money problems, her affairs with women, his sense of inadequacy and guilt over the accident that nearly blinded their son — screams from a marriage that come to the boil in a surreptitiously recorded argument that Triet lets play out in explosive, nerve-jangling flashback.
Meanwhile, the nature of Sandra's rekindled relationship with her former lover and lead defence attorney, Vincent Renzu (Swann Arlaud) — aka "the sexiest lawyer of the French Alps" — casts further doubt on the nature of her character.
In the process, the film becomes less an anatomy of the alleged crime than a dissection of a relationship, a career — even the dynamics of gender, though never in obvious ways.
Triet interrogates society's inherent prejudices — especially when the accused is a woman, and a cultural outsider — and the ways language can shift meaning.
It asks us to examine our own moral standards: What is a perfect marriage? What's fair play in a relationship? Who gets to take ownership of the story, when their are multiple claims upon the truth?
As Sandra puts it: "Sometimes a couple is kind of a chaos."
Anatomy of a Fall is in cinemas now.