The Family Dog Explains the Fall in the Film Anatomy of a Fall

With a dog being the first character to appear on the screen, I could feel myself tense, now worried about his or her fate. The role played by the dog (Snoop) becomes more pivotal when we realize he is a seeing-eye dog for Daniel, an eleven-year-old boy whose eyes were damaged in a terrible accident and who would soon be swept into the eye of a storm.

The man who falls from a third-story window and whose fall will be deconstructed by the authorities is Daniel’s father, Samuel. His wife is Sandra, a novelist, and Daniel’s mother. The family lives in a chalet in the French Alps. Daniel and Snoop find Samuel on the snow, not breathing with blood around his head. The police and ambulance arrive to remove the body and collect evidence.

Vincent a dear family friend and criminal lawyer, has a conversation with Sandra and that’s where the poking and probing begins. The authorities have found inconsistencies with the crime scene and begin zeroing in on the wife as the potential cause of Samuel’s fall.

As the legal drama deepens and we are educated in the unfamiliar and uncomfortable operations of a French courtroom at home, Snoop is never far from view. His tasks are completely normal and unalarming. He does what is expected of a dog - enjoying walks, chasing sticks, and voraciously eating his meals (and other unappetizing snacks only a dog would like).

But in the courtroom, the judge and lawyers, along with the witnesses, pick apart every aspect of Sandra’s life, delving into the microscopic, salacious details that would never be allowed in an American courtroom. The prosecutor is emotionally involved, and his questions and soliloquies are outrageous in their efforts to paint Sandra as a murderer. Meanwhile, our empathy for Samuel dries up like a wet rag left out in the hot sun.

The judge and prosecutor tie themselves in knots as the trial plods along. Their stories and arguments are complicated and intricate, yet in the end, it is the simple, everyday behavior of a dog that exonerates Sandra. All those smart legal minds and mouths met their match because a dog did what dogs do.

Reflecting back on the opening scene, there was no need to worry about Snoop’s welfare. In this story, it was Snoop’s actions that summed up the reason for Samuel’s fall. Snoop ensured that justice was done without any courtroom heroics.

Poor Things Enlightens Minds While Blowing Ours

Poor Things sends us through an educational arc where incomprehension leads to satisfying understanding. Set in the 19th century, a time when humans labored to surpass an infantile understanding of the mechanics of the world, where wacky inventions came from the wildest imaginations, and machinery was a clunky mass of gears, cranks, and glass tubes, the creators of this film have taken it up a hundred notches re-imagining this time in history.

During the Age of Enlightenment, medical science perceived that man could conquer the god-like skills of creating life without the use of an egg and sperm. After all, this was the century during which Frankenstein was written by a young woman in her teens. 

Dissection of human cadavers and medical experimentation had few barriers. Poor Things supposes the most extreme possibilities of both human and animal reanimation and transplantation. Dog head on duck body; pig head on dog body, both beings behaving and functioning perfectly well. So, any self-respecting medical scientist of the time should be perfectly able to transplant a living infant brain into the head of a dead woman, all the better if she is its own suicidal mother. 

The film is shot in black and white up until Bella, the mother with the baby brain, leaves the safe cocoon of her creator’s home and launches herself into the world, actively gorging on learning and knowledge. Gone are the two-dimensional shades of gray because the world outside boils over with color. The sublime flavors of food and drink, the extravagant shapes of structures and nature, and even musical instruments take on wild tones and abilities. Bella, basically an unsupervised toddler, faces potential death at every turn.

Bella discovers and is consumed with the sensations of orgasm. Her immature brain wants what it wants without suffering from modesty or decorum. Sex is fun, and therefore, it should be engaged in often. She is a desirable woman, so her life is advanced through sex and what it can get her. 

When she is shown human suffering and that hell exists on earth, Bella plants her feet on the ground, determined to advance her brain so that she can change the world for the better.

But the largest answer escapes her – why did the mother of the baby, both of whom she now inhabits, jump to her death in the first place?

As her thick black hair never stops growing, Bella never stops advancing. When her creator, aka Godwin, or God for short, dies, leaving her his surgical suite and all his breakthroughs, Bella uses her knowledge, both medical and sexual, to right a massive wrong, ultimately succeeding in reducing suffering in the world.

Poor Things is a masterpiece because it gives us a point of view that is new, bold, and unlikely. When artists of today can imagine things so non-existent such as what is contained in Poor Things, history is made.

I've always been intrigued by ghosts so I became one.

Well that is only partially true. Nothing perks my interest more than a good ghost story, horror novel or film. Zombies are a particular favorite of mine, especially when there are hardy, smart, resourceful survivors in the story.

To me, stories are the manna of life. A good book, an excellent podcast or a binge-able series on Netflix makes my happiness meter go up a few notches. This is why I love listening to people tell me the stories of their lives. Even better, when I am given the permission to write their stories into the form of a book, the creative juices flowing through my veins sometimes make me lose precious hours of sleep. If I am working on a life-story, it is all I can do to ignore my laptop, my fingers itching to get back to work.

If you feel your life story needs to be told; if you are ready to re-live the moments that have shaped you into the person you are today, please consider contacting me to write it all down in a way that will cause readers to never want to put the book down. I should not be the only one losing sleep :)

I would be honored to give readers the details of your story, your message, the lessons you have learned. Maybe you have important information, experiences, expertise, knowledge that must not remain bottled up inside of you, but must be shared with others so they can feel affirmation or understanding.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts. I am available to answer your questions. Let's relive the past so that it lives another day.