A Cannes Film Festival winner wonders: What if strong women were not punished?

Justine Tritt, the writer-director behind this year’s Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall, makes films about the misadventures of working girls and the double standards faced by mothers who dare to be unmotherly. Tritt has directed romantic comedies, relationship dramas, and now a courtroom crime thriller: all of which amplify the fears and anxieties of women who work and play hard.

Films about victims are off the table.

“I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of movies where women are violated, killed, dismembered — movies that say, ‘Look at this poor, suffering woman,’” Treat said recently over a drink in midtown Manhattan. “Why should I make another one?”

Instead, Anatomy of a Fall, the 45-year-old French director’s fourth film, puts a strong woman on trial and asks: How can reversing gender roles change the way we view guilt and innocence?

Sandra (Sandra Höller) is a famous novelist and translator. She’s conceited, bisexual, and her flinty gaze can scatter a crowd. She is German and lives in a multi-storey chalet in the French Alps with her French husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), and their 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is blind. Samuel is also a writer, but his career is not as important.

In the film’s opening scene, we see Sandra interviewing a graduate student while a steel drum version of 50 Cent’s “PIMP” plays on deafening repeat. Music – vengefully blared by Samuel from the upper room – cuts short Sandra’s pleasant discussion. Tensions are high, so when Daniel finds his father face down in the snow, dead after falling from an upstairs window, Sandra becomes the only suspect.

“I wanted to show how a woman could be attacked specifically for her intelligence, ambition, and mental fortitude,” Treat said. She added that Sandra “was broken down by a moral society that intensely scrutinizes the way women choose to live their lives.”

Tritt developed the project with Höller, the German actress best known for playing a joy-killing professional woman in Toni Erdmann’s film, from the beginning. Tritt said that Holler’s character “can come off as cold and hostile, but not in a murderous caricature way.” “It’s just her natural way of being, which conveys both a mystery that makes her seem threatening, and says, ‘I’m not a perfect mother.'” “I’m a human being,” she added.

Holler said she played Sandra with a kind of warmth and emotion that didn’t rely on easy gestures of sympathy, like constantly crying and smiling. The character is “a real adult, which is rare,” Holler said in a recent phone interview. “She doesn’t apologize for who she is, even if it gets her into trouble.”

Tritt and her husband, director Arthur Harary, co-wrote “Anatomy of a Fall” during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, which the couple spent in isolation with their two children. Harari helped write the screenplay for Treat’s previous film, the powerful psychological drama “Sibyl,” but “Anatomy of a Fall” was a real “union of two minds,” closely crafted behind closed doors, Tritt said.

In “Anatomy of a Fall”, the literary rivalry between Sandra and Samuel, and the process of culling their lives for inspiration, is used against Sandra in court. A kind of nesting doll effect is evident in the similarities between real and fictional couples — Treat and Harry, Sandra and Samuel, characters in the couple’s fictional books — but the director said the artistic bickering between husband and wife in the film was not autobiographical.

Tritt and Harari treated the film as “a playground, as well as a nightmarish vision of what will never happen to us,” Harari wrote in an email. “Justine was and still is more ‘successful’ than me, but I’m a long way from Samuel. I probably relate more to Sandra!”

Treat said she grew up wanting to be a painter. Her parents were avid moviegoers – her father once worked as an projectionist – but her desire to make films came relatively late. At art school, she took courses in video and editing, which inspired her to change course, immersing herself in the work of pioneering documentary and experimental filmmakers for whom the distinction between fiction and fact was not important: Frederick Wiseman, Shirley Clark, Alan King, and Raymond. Sorry.

Tritt began her filmmaking career directing chaotically expressive short documentaries about contemporary politics, including one about the 2007 presidential election in France. Eventually, she began writing her own scripts, making her film debut in 2013 with The Age of Panic, a frenetic farce shot quickly and on a shoestring budget with a mix of professional and non-professional actors. The film follows a single mother dealing with a cruel ex-husband and her new childish boyfriend while juggling her job as a news reporter.

Nowadays, Tritt admits to being somewhat of a control freak when it comes to the writing and editing phases of a film, which represents a departure from the guerilla-style methods of her earlier work. However, on set, Tritt continues to embrace the sense of freedom that characterized her early work: “I would never show up to a shoot and say, ‘I know exactly what I want.’ ‘Do this, do that,’ because I’m the director,” Tritt said.

“The group is not dictated by any sacred hierarchy,” she added. “It is a space of exploration where one has to be very humble. It is the only way to create something truly new.”

When Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or, Tritt became the third woman to win the award. The first was Jane Campion for “The Piano” in 1993; The second is Tret’s compatriot, Julia Ducournau, for the film “Titane” in 2021.

“When I started making films, ‘feminism’ was not considered a serious cinematic topic in France,” Tritt said. But since then, even my perspective has evolved. “I’ve put a lot of time into thinking about what it really means to be a woman — to have power as a woman — and how we’re treated like monsters because we behave in certain ways that men usually forgive.”

“It took us a while to see that there was a problem with representation,” she added, praising the recent shift in awareness about gender equality in the French film industry. “The world is changing. If you can’t see it – well. You’ll have to learn.”