Justine Triet, a Palme d’Or winner facing the spotlight

A woman finds herself in the sudden glare of the spotlight. As a cultural figure she has courted fame, but now it comes coupled with infamy. We know little about her, only an impression based on interviews, snippets of her work and an escalating row. She will be judged harshly by some. Many of the assumptions made about her will prove wrong.

This is the story told in Anatomy of a Fall, a French crime drama about a novelist accused of murdering her husband, which last weekend won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It is also, in many ways, the story of the film’s director and co-writer Justine Triet, who used her acceptance speech to express solidarity with recent protests against French president Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms and to condemn what she saw as the erosion of France’s system for supporting the film industry.

Present and bristling in the Grand Théâtre Lumière that evening was French culture minister Rima Abdul Malak. It didn’t take her long to hit back. “Happy to see the Palme d’Or awarded to Justine Triet, the 10th for France!” she tweeted. “But dismayed by the unfairness of her speech. This film could not have been made without our French model of film financing, which allows for a diversity that is unique in the world. Let’s not forget it.”

Cannes mayor David Lisnard went a step further, decrying Triet’s statement as “the speech of a spoiled child”. Triet, who is only the third woman in 76 film festivals to take home the top prize, had previously told Variety: “I’ve been spoiled to be twice in competition at Cannes.” But she stressed in her speech that it was increasingly difficult for nascent French filmmakers to follow in her footsteps. She dedicated her prize “to all young female and male directors and to those who today are unable to make films. We must make room for them and give them the place I took 15 years ago when I started, in a world that was a little less hostile.”

Until last weekend, few outside France and the art house film world had heard of the 44-year-old director. Born in 1978 in Fécamp, a small town on Normandy’s Alabaster Coast, Triet studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris. She then went on to direct a series of short films that showed early signs of her political engagement. Sur Place (2007) was set amid the Paris youth protests of 2006, while her first feature La Bataille de Solférino (2013) was about a TV news reporter covering political campaigning on the Paris street that houses the headquarters of the French socialist party. It was shot largely on location during the May 2012 presidential elections.

Triet’s next two features displayed her penchant for blurring fiction and reality. In Bed with Victoria (2016) starred Virginie Efira as a lawyer whose ex-partner was using her old cases as fodder for his fiction, while Sybil (2019) portrayed a psychotherapist (Efira again) who borrows details from the life of a patient for her novel.

This melding of the professional and private spheres is evident in Triet’s own life. Both Sybil and Anatomy of a Fall were co-written with her partner, Arthur Harari, with whom she has two children. It is hard not to see traces of this partnership in Anatomy’s depiction of a writer married to a man who works in the same field but enjoys the higher profile — and the frictions that arise from that imbalance.

Triet is no stranger to activism. A member of Collectif 50/50, she has campaigned for equality for women working in the French film industry. But it’s safe to say that the furore of the past week is new terrain for her.

“Her speech did not surprise me at all. It is consistent with what she has always fought for,” fellow French director Rebecca Zlotowski tells the FT. “Behind the vehement tone, I heard a declaration of love for the virtuous French system of film financing, as much as for French cinema . . . ”

One observer who may be enjoying the row is this year’s Cannes jury president Ruben Östlund, the Swedish director of previous Palme d’Or winners The Square and Triangle of Sadness. “It’s very important that we fight against the idea of consensus,” he declared at the opening ceremony. “Consensus is the most boring thing.” 

Both Triet and Östlund like to place their characters on morally slippery terrain. Östlund came to fame with Force Majeure (2014), in which the catalysing event is an avalanche during which a father abandons his wife and children. Anatomy of a Fall is another alpine-set film driven by self interest. The central protagonist, Sandra (brilliantly played by Sandra Hüller), is single-minded about her writing career and unrepentant about both an extramarital affair and recycling an idea from her husband’s stalled writing in her own book.

Triet, at least in her work, is fond of highly-charged confrontations and Anatomy explores how such episodes can become twisted as the film shifts into courtroom drama. As she told The Hollywood Reporter during Cannes: “I really see the court as a place where our lives are fictionalised, where a story, a narrative, is put on our life. Everybody there is telling a story, everybody’s creating a narrative, and everything is very far from the truth.”

She may now discover that the court of public opinion is no different. What she will do next is unknown. But it seems safe to assume that her recent experience will find its way into a future film script. 

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