This past Wednesday, I saw the Tara Theater’s screening of Justine Triet’s award-winning “Anatomy of a Fall,” a new French drama/crime film that is on limited release in the U.S. What interested me about this film, in particular, was its usage of sound as a supporting element.

Essentially, the premise or primary plot of the story is whether two writers, a wife named Sandra (Sandra Huller) and a husband named Samuel (Samuel Theis), were involved in a domestic homicide. The court’s prevailing theory is that Sandra killed her husband by pushing him off the third story of their chalet in the French Alps. Though, crucially, Sandra’s husband has no dialogue at the time of the incident. The only sound we hear during the incident is an instrumental rendition of 50 Cent’s 2000s hit song P.I.M.P.

While Sandra is conducting an interview regarding her profession with a younger college student, Samuel plays an alternative version of 50 Cent’s hit song off his 2003 project “Get Rich or Die Tryin’ on loop. Booming Caribbean drums flood the walls of the cordoned-off chalet, and Sandra cites that Samuel prefers to work on his writing while listening to loud music. This backing track then allows for the masking of any sound during the actual incident; thus, the only witness, their son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), cannot hear the lead-up to Samuel’s fatal fall.
The incident became a heavily debated topic in the French newspapers and court system, prefaced with the crucial question: “Did she do it?”. Was Samuel’s death an accident or a carefully orchestrated murder? The song’s usage comes into play as a diegetic and non-diegetic backing track, which floods the scenes of analepsis, or flashbacks, and the court scenes as the trial is ongoing. Triet claims that the song played a crucial role in the film, giving Samuel a voice where he cannot express himself and his feelings toward Sandra. Much like Samuel’s overall demeanor in the film, the song’s passive-aggressive tone emulates his sentiment toward Sandra’s infidelity, revealed progressively as the film continues. Overall, the song’s placement adds a lot to the film and provides a memorable backing track to one of the more unique films I have seen this year.