Justine Triet was born in 1978 in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. She studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and began her career making short films and documentary work before turning to features. Her debut, La Bataille de Solferino (2013), was shot partly during the 2012 French presidential election and established the approach she would develop across her next four features: close, slightly uncomfortable attention to people under pressure, often in relationships that are fraying.

Her second film, In Bed with Victoria (Victoria, 2016), starring Virginie Efira as a lawyer navigating professional and romantic chaos simultaneously, showed Triet’s particular gift for the comedy of adult competence — of people who are very good at their jobs and somewhat lost everywhere else. The film won her significant attention in France and established Efira as one of her primary collaborators.

Sybil (2019) pushed further into formal complication, with Efira again as a psychoanalyst who becomes obsessed with a patient. The film is uneven — its second half doesn’t fully deliver on what the first half promises — but it contains some of Triet’s best individual scenes and demonstrated her ability to handle registers simultaneously: comedy, thriller, melodrama, clinical observation.

Anatomy of a Fall and the Palme d’Or

Anatomy of a Fall (2023) was the film that brought her international recognition. The Palme d’Or at Cannes was deserved but also, in the context of French film, somewhat overdue — Triet had been one of the most interesting directors working in French cinema for nearly a decade, and the prize felt like a correction as much as a discovery.

What distinguishes Anatomy of a Fall from her earlier work is its formal austerity. The earlier films had a looseness, an improvisatory quality that suited their subject matter. Anatomy is tight — every scene has a function, every line of dialogue carries weight — and the formal control amplifies the emotional stakes rather than containing them. The courtroom is a machine for producing narrative clarity, and Triet spends 150 minutes demonstrating that narrative clarity is a lie.

“Her camera tends to stay at a middle distance — close enough to read faces, far enough to remind us that reading faces is itself an act of interpretation.”

Recurring Concerns

Across her work, Triet returns to certain preoccupations: the professional woman under scrutiny, the couple whose dynamic is legible to others in ways it isn’t to themselves, the law as a framework that can only ever approximate justice. She is interested in how institutions — courts, therapy, journalism — process human complexity and inevitably distort it. She is also, consistently, very funny, in a way that her more earnest admirers sometimes miss.

She has spoken in interviews about her admiration for John Cassavetes and the Dardenne brothers — the former for his attention to the performance of emotion, the latter for their moral seriousness — and both influences are legible without being imitative. What she has built is entirely her own.

Filmography

  • La Bataille de Solferino (2013)
  • In Bed with Victoria (2016)
  • Sybil (2019)
  • Anatomy of a Fall (2023) — Review →