“I wrote for him”: this actor was made to play in the last Palme d’Or

Autopsy of the couple

Sandra (Sandra Huler), her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their visually impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) live together in the French mountains. Far from everything, they get little and have no neighbors.

One day, Samuel was found dead at the foot of their chalet. accident? suicide? kill? The trial is open, the main defendant of which is Sandra. Along with young Daniel, the audience attends many hearings, dissections of the couple and the revelation of their many secrets.

The culprit…or the victim?

A talented novelist of German origin, Sandra’s character is the focus of the trial and the film as a whole. Brilliant but vulnerable in this alien world where even the language seems hostile, she tries to somehow protect herself. The vulnerability that the actor Sandra Huler He was perfectly able to copy her silence, hesitation and worried look.

But it is in the ambivalence of his character that the artist’s genius is revealed. Awarded for her performance in Requiem and Toni Erdmann, the Thuringian actress is sometimes anxious, sometimes anxious in Anatomy of a Fall. Moving from one expression to the next in a split second, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes seductive, he raises doubts in the jury as much as in the audience.

A meeting of two women

It must be said that director Justin Triet did not choose the actor by chance. The filmmaker, the third in the history of the 7th art to win the coveted Palme d’Or, justifies the choice. Sandra Huler :”After that I wanted to work with him again Sybil. I wrote for him, he knew that, that’s one of the things that got me going in the first place. This free woman who is finally valued for her sexuality, her work, her motherhood: I thought it would bring complexity, impurity to the character, to completely remove the concept of “message.”“.

Torn from the twirl, thrown to the ground in front of the audience and her own child, Sarah struggles, sometimes giving up, proving to be as difficult as she is complete. An extremely personal interpretation, loaded with experience and truth, which impressed the director like never before.

“He brought faith, a truth that transcends scriptcontinues the filmmaker. It is he who anchors a slightly artificial dialogue in the reality that passes through him. Otherwise, he will reject it and throw it in my face. It’s very lively, in any case; He comes down and he has a strong point of view, everything goes through his body. He is chemically imprinted in the film like several actors. At the end of the shoot, I felt like he gave me his part, really. And what I caught could not reproduce.“

Anatomy of the Fall, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, can be seen exclusively in cinemas from August 23.