Anatomy of a Fall Sweeps the EFAs
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The Arena in Berlin fell quiet on Saturday evening when Sandra Hüller called for a few moments of silence in which to “imagine peace.” Hüller, who was accepting her Best Actress nod at the European Film Awards for her performance in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, did not specify for whom she was making her appeal. Talking to the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough a few days earlier, Agnieszka Holland, president of the European Film Academy, noted that “Russians are EFA members. Ukrainians are members. The Palestinians are our members and Israelis are our members.” The “paradox” here, Holland added, is that as “more and more [of] the world is on fire,” the awards ceremony must be “less political than in previous years.”
Holland’s latest feature, Green Border, is anything but apolitical. Depicting the horrendous plight of refugees being pushed—and at times, literally thrown—by armed guards back and forth across the border separating Belarus and Poland, the film has been targeted by leaders of Poland’s outgoing right-wing coalition government. Introducing Green Border’s German premiere at Berlin’s Around the World in 14 Films festival on Friday, Holland slyly thanked those leaders for giving her team free publicity worth around two million euros. Green Border, now a box-office hit in Poland, was nominated for three EFAs and won none, but it did pick up a Special Jury Prize when it premiered in Venice.
Back in October, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced that its Career Achievement award will be presented to Holland in January. On Sunday, the LAFCA split its Best Lead Performance award between Emma Stone, the star of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, and Hüller, who was honored for her performances in both Anatomy and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, the winner of LAFCA’s prizes for Best Film and Best Director of 2023. Zone is also the Boston Society of Film Critics’ pick for Best Non-English Language Film.
The clear winner on Saturday, though, was Anatomy of a Fall, which scored the EFAs for Best Film, Director, Screenplay (Triet and her partner, Arthur Harari), Editing (Laurent Sénéchal), and of course, Actress. Hüller plays a German writer suspected of killing her French husband (Samuel Theis) at their snow-dusted chalet in the Alps. Anatomy, which has won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and Best International Feature accolades at the Gotham Awards and the British Independent Film Awards as well as from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association, and the LAFCA, “spends two-and-a-half hours demolishing the very idea of empirical, observable truth,” writes Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “Triet’s movie is a monument to the ambiguous and unknown, a labyrinth of half-glimpsed causes and vague, sinister effects.”
When Anatomy screened at the New York Film Festival, Adam Nayman, writing for Reverse Shot, suggested that “this hybrid courtroom drama-slash-psychological thriller is so conducive for both chin-stroking critical contemplation and a certain—albeit highly rarefied—form of crowd-pleasing that it could just as easily have been engineered in a lab as crafted as a work of art; the tension between such mere (if excellent) engineering (i.e., effectiveness) and art (i.e., some meaning within or beyond its well-wrought boundaries) is what makes Anatomy of a Fall worth reckoning with.” For Michael Atkinson at the Village Voice, “Hüller’s performance is a master class in openly and actively connecting us to her character’s every earnest hesitation.”
Mads Mikkelsen won the EFA Best Actor for playing a commoner who rises in the military ranks in eighteenth-century Denmark in Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land, which also scored Best Cinematography (Rasmus Videbæk) and Costume Design (Kicki Ilander). The Promised Land “shows once again that period pieces can be vigorous, powerful, and emotionally stirring,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, “this one enriched by themes of class, racism, sexual abuse, labor exploitation, and chosen families. It’s a handsome production that displays all the virtues of assured old-fashioned storytelling without a trace of stodge.”
Two young British directors were honored for their debut features. Charlotte Regan won the Young Audience Award for Scrapper, which happens to have been shot by Molly Manning Walker, who won the European Discovery FIPRESCI Prize for How to Have Sex. Best Documentary went to Estonian director Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, a film that “speak[s] volumes about what it means to be a woman,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the New York Times, “even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.”
Pablo Berger’s silent Robot Dreams, the story of the friendship between a dog and his robot in 1980s New York, won Best Animated Feature. “Fashioned into moving form from the graphic novel by Sara Varon,” wrote Carlos Aguilar for IndieWire in May, “this hand-drawn buddy dramedy preserves both the cartoon strip aesthetic and lack of dialogue of the source material for a delightfully bittersweet animated wonder that embodies the medium’s most purely cinematic qualities. Now the fierce battle for the title of the best animated film of the year has a new strong contender.”
In a video beamed in from London, Vanessa Redgrave received this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award from her daughter, Joely Richardson. The Honorary Award of the EFA President and Board went to Béla Tarr, and shortly before the ceremony, Martin Kudlac spoke with him for ScreenAnarchy. Tarr has recently become interested in opera, and he’s contemplating working with “actual gypsies,” he says, on “a brand-new version of Carmen. My issue is that I’m not fond of Bizet’s libretto or music. I’ve been thinking of creating a completely new Carmen, starting from scratch.”
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