Anatomy of a Fall: Telling Feminist Truths through Courtroom Drama

Event Description

In Anatomy of a Fall (2023), a crime novelist - Sandra Voyter – is charged with murder. Her husband Samuel Maleski has died under suspicious circumstances: he has fallen from a window of the couple’s remote cottage in the French Alps. The only possible witness is their eleven-year-old son Daniel, who is struggling to understand what happened and who to believe. The central question the film poses is whether Sandra’s husband died from a tragic accident, from suicide or from fowl play? Yet the inscrutable and brilliant protagonist’s answer is embedded in ambiguity, ambivalence, and complexity. In this talk, I explore how French filmmaker Justine Triet uses the generic conventions of the courtroom drama to grapple with the legal system’s construction of truth and the ways in which formal and informal legal actors judge women according to their adherence to – or lack of adherence to – patriarchal standards of femininity in terms of household division of labour, sexuality and fulfillment, career aspirations, and motherhood. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Canadian Network for Law and Humanities and the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies with acknowledgement to the SSHRC.

Speaker

Suzanne Bouclin is a law professor teaching in the fields of social justice, human rights and conflict resolution at the University of Ottawa. Her research engages with critical legal studies, feminist jurisprudence, and film/communications studies to examine the regulation of equity-deserving and marginalized groups. Her recent book Women, Film, and Law (2021) examines how fictional representations of women's incarceration can shed light on the social exclusion and oppression experienced by criminalized women. She is currently writing on theories of social justice in film.