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Geoff-Atlanta
Reviews
Anatomie d'une chute (2023)
Overrated, overlong, overtalky, self-parody French film featuring hateful couple, implausible legal proceedings
Where to start? First of all, almost nothing happens in this film after the first 15 minutes. The rest is almost 100% talk.
Of the rest of the film, the only dramatic and interesting scene is a long flashback involving a slow-boil fight between wife and husband occurring a day before the husband's falling death. This is a great scene, while difficult to watch, and it's literally the only scene we get to see of the husband and wife together. It made me wonder if a better film might be found with more scenes showing the dynamics of their marriage and much less showing a dubious deep dive into French courtroom drama.
The writer/director eschews any physical drama altogether, so predictably cuts away from the marital fight the moment before the fight turns physical, giving us audio-only playback in the courtroom. This is a dodge intended to heighten the uncertainty over exactly what happened in that fight, and it feels both cowardly as a director and also manipulative.
As for the couple themselves, they are both hateful and unsympathetic, with the husband portrayed as an irredeemable ***hole blasting instrumental rap music in the house at ear-splitting volume while the wife is being interviewed by a graduate student. The nearly blind son mentions that he has to leave the house on occasions because he can't stand his father's music played at deafeningly high volumes. This begs the question, why should we care at all whether this ***hole father/husband jumped out a window or was pushed off a balcony by the wife?
Remarkably, the wife eventually reveals herself to be equally unsympathetic, admitting to numerous extramarital / lesbian flings starting in the year after the son's accident, and then in that fight showing explicit hostility to the very idea that there should be "reciprocity" in a marriage. She dissects her husband's psychological impediments like a surgeon dissecting a frog, which comes off as chilly, heartless cruelty in their argument. She defends stealing her husband's one great literary idea as her manifest destiny, since she was the writer first able to expand the idea from an outline to full-length novel. Clearly this is a couple that just needs to get divorced, but that would be too easy.
Most of the film is an agonizing slop through the French legal system, mostly in the form of the wife's trial for murder. Here we find very scant forensic evidence (blood spatter) pointing toward murder, which can easily be explained in the alternative scenario of suicide. In place of forensic evidence, the court dives into a highly dubious, oh-so-French psychoanalysis of the dynamics of the marriage, which is utterly irrelevant to distinguishing between murder and suicide. Extracting confessions of infidelity does not advance the case for murder and arguably advances the case of suicide. Equally, the magical discovery of an audio recording of the fight the day before the death plausibly argues for suicide at least as much as murder, because the wife so effectively destroys her husband's identity through the course of that fight. It's all utterly irrelevant to determining guilt or innocence. If this is how the French conduct murder trials, god help them.
Better Call Saul: Saul Gone (2022)
Hugs and learning
Larry David's famous rule guiding Seinfeld was, "No hugs, no learning." No feel-good sentimentality, no craven morality lessons wrenched through sudden character epiphanies inside a 22-minute episode.
Through 124 mostly excellent episodes of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould seemed to demonstrate the same mantra. Sure, characters evolved over time, most famously Walt in going from Mr. Chips to Scarface, in Gilligan's formulation. However, the genius of both series was showing the slow evolution of character over many episodes and earning those character shifts one degree at a time.
Now in this final episode, we are asked to watch Gene first to lurch suddenly into Saul mode, spinning a farcical version of himself as a mere victim of Walter White -- and improbably earning himself a quick plea bargain with only a 7-1/2 year prison sentence. Then, on the very flimsy pretext that Kim *might* be subject to a civil lawsuit from Cheryl Hamlin, Saul somehow induces Kim to show up to his hearing, whereupon Saul suddenly confesses to *everything* -- including all the Breaking Bad crimes having nothing to do with Kim -- apparently to take the heat off Kim and impress Kim with his sincerity.
This is about as ludicrous as John Hinckley Jr shooting Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. While that did happen, Hinckley was declared not guilty by reason of insanity. That's the level of unrecognizable motivation (in this case, a sudden urge for redemption) we see in Saul suddenly declaring himself to be Jimmy and confessing all his sins, all to impress the woman who divorced him. For this "learning" moment, Jimmy / Saul is rewarded with an 86-year sentence in a supermax prison, which is cartoonishly excessive for a first-time non-violent felon.
Sure, I get it, actions have consequences, and Saul Goodman deserved prison time. However, the quick shifts in character we witness are completely unearned and not even credible on the surface. Gould didn't even spell out how this torrent of confession might save Kim from a civil suit, when Kim's own affidavit was grounds enough for a civil suit by Cheryl Hamlin. (The recent Cheryl Hamlin subplot has its own problems. Who is this grieving, righteous woman, from a failing marriage that we witnessed ourselves to be loveless?)
One reason this final episode is so unconvincing in its redemption narrative is because so much time is taken in final-bow flashback scenes -- first with Mike, then Walt, then Chuck -- plus the sudden screen time awarded to grieving widow Marie Schrader. While I love all these characters (or love to hate, in Chuck's case), each appearance stalls focus on Jimmy / Saul / Gene's character and the Jimmy / Kim relationship, which are properly the focus of the final episode. This is pure fan service, which has been going on more quietly in earlier episodes. Yes, it can be great to see encore performances, but four encore performances are at least three too many in a final episode.
I think Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan love their actors, their characters and their fans, and so all this encore fan-service stuff must have felt as close to a group hug and final bow as they could manage. But, honestly, I wish they had saved that feeling for a reunion special in which they get the whole gang together to talk about what a great experience it was creating Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. I'd gladly watch hours of such fan service. But true fan service in the final episode would be sticking to their guns and sticking to the real drama and believable character motivations that they taught us to crave from them.
Finally, these last 4 episodes really spoil the idea of BCS being a prequel to BB. Through episode 9 of this season, BCS could be viewed by a newcomer prior to BB without spoiling BB, but the last 4 episodes let the cat out of the bag by telling the audience what happened to all the main characters of BB. Hank dead, angry widow Marie, Walt a meth kingpin and now dead, a deal given to Skyler, and finally Saul in prison the rest of his life. What a bummer to watch these last 4 episodes and then move on to BB for the first time. The prequel managed to spoil the character arcs of the original series!
BCS could have and should have ended with season 6, episode 9, "Fun and Games." Perfect ending.