Justine Triet on deciding — and hiding — the guilt in her film Anatomy of a Fall

French director Justine Triet seems to be courting suspense. Because outside of her writing, directing and new film itself, the biggest surprise she’s been part of may have taken place off-screen.

Despite the success of her new film, Anatomy of a Fall, a courtroom drama that probes the guilt or innocence of a woman in the sudden death of her husband, it was the shunning by France as its submission to the Academy Awards this year that possibly shocked more people.

Instead of choosing the Palme d’Or-winning movie that Triet both co-wrote and directed, that honour went to the crowd-pleasing yet perhaps more tame The Taste of Things — a Cannes prize-winning film itself, but still comparably less talked about among those watching the race.

Still, that hasn’t detracted much from the film’s buzz. An audience favourite at both the Toronto International Film Festival and Telluride, it’s now racking up critical acclaim. Anatomy of a Fall arrives in theatres in Canada on Friday.

CBC News spoke with Triet about crafting the film and hiding the truth — even from her cast.

You wrote this movie with its star, Sandra Hüller, in mind to play the lead role, whom you have worked with previously. Why did you want to work with her again and make a character just for her?

I was really looking forward to work with Sandra again. On the previous film Sibyl, we’d only encountered for 12 days, which was a bit frustrating for me. And so I really thought the entire character for her, for her opacity, for her ungraspable-ability, for her complexity. And I couldn’t imagine a different actress to play this character that is undecipherable in this way.

Is it true she asked you whether her character was guilty?

Yes. Two days before the shooting, she called me in a bit of a panic, asking to know whether or not her character was guilty, and my only answer was that she needed to play innocently.

Doesn’t she need to know the truth of the character she’s playing?

For me, I think the principal thing was for her to play innocently, because that meant to play without the effect of duplicity, or without any of the tricks of the trade of a TV show drama. I was really looking for a kind of documentary rawness.

You use that courtroom as a place to talk about being a woman and being an artist. Talk to me about putting your character on that stage and how you wanted to use those courtroom scenes.

Her character, in many ways, is tracked or surveilled. And she’s analyzed for much more than her action; she’s analyzed for her mores. And in this way, the tribunal is always the space that comes to act as a moral mirror for social imposition.

In resisting, her character is very free — and I’m not saying she’s perfect, far be it from me the idea of making an edifying movie — but I wanted to show how her freedom, or her power, makes her a threatening figure to that.

Is there a bit of you there? In how you may feel people perceive you as an artist, or how some may want to use your art to say something about you as a woman — did something of that go into this film?

Well, of course, when I’m talked about, I’m always told that I’m a woman [laughs]. I want one day for this to be a non-subject, but in the meantime, it took some time for me to come to really understand the stakes of feminist struggles. And to be able to identify the places in which I was being judged, and where I was a victim of a system of critique whereby women aren’t allowed to make errors in the same way. And where success is always a little bit more suspect.

Is there an objective truth in this movie? Do you have the answer? Is there an answer?

Yes, I have the answer. But it was very important to me that truth cannot emerge in the courtroom. It won’t and it doesn’t. I was interested in this couple exactly for the fact that they are the face of something that goes beyond a kind of Manichean good and evil: There’s a bad guy and a good guy, and a victim and not.

I think the most interesting thing that I have been told about this film is that she can be responsible without being guilty, or she could be guilty without being responsible. She could be responsible for having driven him to suicide without being guilty of having killed him, or she could have killed him without having wanted to — whether in an impulsive way or in however we can try to imagine that. So truth exists, but it’s too complex to be grasped here.

This interview has been translated from its original French. It has been edited for length and clarity.