Dissecting Anatomy of a Fall’s successful avoidance from becoming a dry courtroom drama, we’d find that the reasons for its allure are, in officiated order: 1) a iron-heart performance by Sandra Hüller and 2) its looser grip on event finality. Did (the fictional) Sandra kill her husband? It doesn’t matter; by the end, our guesswork and initial understanding of human behavior are frayed at both ends (in an exhilarating way, that is).

It’s easy to play the find-the-villain game when we talk about adults depicted as sentient beings with their own caliber of experience and intelligence. But it’s uncomfortable to shift that same game onto children, where we may hesitate more about pointing the finger. The consequences of child-blaming are never directly onto the child, however. In the root cause analysis, we’d wonder, “Well, what are the parents like?” It may play out in grandiose flair like the first season of Big Little Lies, or little-wonder discoveries like Kore-eda’s Monster. In Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s Armand, which holds court during a single parent-teacher conference, you may find less interest in the children and more about what the heck is going on with these adults.

Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve), an actress with a controversial public image, arrives at the school in disheveled, loose garments. She meets with the teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) to discuss her six-year-old son Armand’s alleged behavior of sexual assault against another child, Jon. The other boy’s parents, Sarah (Ellen Dorit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit), join in for a meeting that is uncomfortable in content and unprepared in its fact-finding presentation. Defensive words are heated and exchanged, and it is until we get in the trenches then we find that Sarah and Elisabeth are siblings-in-law through Elisabeth’s deceased husband, Thomas.

But Armand doesn’t always go for the big reveals. It’s the quiet conversations, peculiar moments, and missteps in between the blow-outs that dresses a sort of cabin fever occurring with the adults trying to adult. Behind the scenes, Sunna and the administrators try to portray an impartial behavior, but in the presence of stardom (“I confirmed the [meeting] time with a smiley,” Sunna brightly shares), it sometimes feel improvised. Things are solemnly stated without a hint of irony but still hits the funny bone all the same (“In our opinion, playing doctor stays in kindergarten.” “…Okay, maybe.”) Jealousy reeks from Sarah’s putrid feelings toward Elisabeth, which may or may not confound the truth in Jon’s story.

While the scenes are driven by the grown-ups, there is a fantastical element that runs through the desks and hallways, such to say that imagination is not limited to children. Working hand in hand with the clashing that’s going on in the conference, Elisabeth’s imagination runs to dance sequences with the custodian, a claustrophobic congregation with other parents in the area. The broken fire alarm keeps going off. Footsteps sound like hammering into linoleum. Elisabeth breaks out into a minutes-long nervous laughter that will probably, believe it or not, determine how much you can tolerate the rest of the film.

Armand is admittedly interesting at first because of the shocking allegations. We tune in to how Elisabeth responds (rationally, as a parent would about their child) to the possibility of her child being a perpetrator, and how Sarah and Anders respond to Elisabeth’s response. For the most part, Anders is a kind of non-entity, Jason-Bateman-in-Juno sort of husband (if not detected by his way of both-siding in the conversation, it might be the MOLDEJAZZ shirt that screams “I’m still cool!”). While Sarah reflects the role of the protective mother akin to Laura Dern’s character in Big Little Lies, Peterson’s still, yet sad, expressions tell the story of how it feels to live as a shadow to Elisabeth. The cast plays their characters well.

While the film finds its way to the sort of conclusion that Anatomy of a Fall deters from, it doesn’t stop short of striking imagery – that of ostracization (not by kids, but by adults), the church-like confession at the end of a dark hallway, the dimly-lit projector obscuring the cracks of communication. Growing up might look different, but there’s not a more reductive feeling than helplessness.

Armand
2024
dir. Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
117 min.

Opens Friday, 2/14 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre