In the opening scene of “Anatomy of a Fall,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, writer Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is being interviewed by a young student about her work. Then, her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) starts playing music at full volume, interrupting the interview by playing the same song over and over again. And it’s not just any music, it’s a cover of 50 Cent’s “PIMP” by Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band.
The song is central to the film’s plot: Sandra’s husband falls to his death from the roof of their villa and she is charged with murder. He clearly sang the song to spite her. But was there an argument before he jumped to his death? And could his son hear the steel drums?
Another question is why this version of “PIMP,” a German funk band’s rollicking, steel-drum-accented take on a 2000s Caribbean-rap classic, ended up as the centerpiece of a French art film that took the Croisette by storm. For starters, it wasn’t the filmmakers’ first choice. Director Justine Triet says that she and her co-writer Arthur Harari originally planned to use Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” as the song that would ruin Sandra’s interview. They even wrote an analysis of Parton’s lyrics into the courtroom scene. But about a month before shooting, they realized they couldn’t get the rights. “At first, we were really disappointed,” Triet says.
Having had to give up on her first choice, Triet eventually landed on a cover of Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band’s “PIMP,” from their 2016 debut album, 55. She was already a fan and had been listening to the song for years. Because the song had to represent the Samuel the audience only sees in flashbacks after his death, Triet thought it appropriate to choose a relatively unknown cover that would still retain the “essence of the song.” It’s only natural that someone like Samuel, a teacher and aspiring writer who probably thought he was pretty cool, would gravitate towards this version.
“I hear this song a lot and I think it’s aggressive,” Triet says, “but at the same time I think it’s really funny, right?”
Posthumously, Samuel knows how to get Sandra into absurd situations that play out gruesomely on screen: “PIMP” plays over and over as investigators try to re-create a conversation Sandra and Samuel may have had before the fall to see if her son can hear them.
Later, when Sandra went on trial, prosecutors suggested she had a motive to kill Samuel because of the song’s misogynistic lyrics; her defense pointed out that it was an instrumental version. From the moment Tolliet and Harari learned that “PIMP” was in the film, they knew someone would try to use it against Sandra, assuming she would respond in some way to the context behind the beat. “It’s so famous,” Tolliet says, adding that everyone knows the music video, full of sexy women.
Another key piece in “Anatomy” is a Chopin prelude that Sandra and Samuel’s son, Daniel (Milo Machado Gruner), practices repeatedly. Triet liked the contrast between what sounds more melancholic and what seems like a joke to the viewer. As she explains, Chopin is classical, and “PIMP” is classical, but in a different sense.
