Laurent Sénéchal's career as an editor has been shaped by his collaborations with Arthur Harari and Justine Triet. The first feature he cut was Harari's 2007 film, La Main sur la gueule, which was followed by Triet's 2010 documentary Des ombres dans la maison. In all, he has edited five of Harari's films and four of Triet's.
Anatomy of a Fall marks a collaboration between all three filmmakers: Triet directs from a script that she and Harari wrote together, with Sénéchal serving as the film's editor. The French drama centers on a writer who is put on trial for the mysterious death of her husband. The film refuses to provide the audience with any easy answers about her potential innocence or guilt, which posed an enormous challenge for Sénéchal in the edit.
"Small details could derail the entire movie," he explains. "The character of Sandra could become completely manipulative or completely innocent, and we could lose the ambiguity of her character and the story if we didn't find the right balance. The ambiguity is really what we had to maintain."
At the 96th Oscars, Anatomy of a Fall received five nominations, including Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing; it is Sénéchal's first Oscar nomination.
"When the film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, that was amazing. But I always thought the good wave that would come from that would end sometime around December 2023," says the editor. "When I got the Oscar nomination and the film got five total, that was so unexpected!"
Below, Sénéchal shares with A.frame his five favorite films.
Directed by: James L. Brooks | Edited by: Richard Marks
I really love Terms of Endearment. I discovered it very recently — it was actually Justine who told me, 'That movie's for you' — and it's an amazing film. To me, it's a movie that talks very smoothly about life and time. It doesn't insist that people are violent. There are, of course, violent moments in life and in the film, but the only real antagonism in Terms of Endearment comes from time and human existence itself. I think movies like that are really nice.
When they work, they're like poetry and your emotions come from everything you see in them. You're swept up in the story, but you're also noticing the trees, and the wind, and the birds. There's always something that is beautiful. It's cinema that is artistically pushing you to believe that life is good — even if it's hard.
Directed by: Pascale Ferran | Edited by: Yann Dedet and Mathilde Muyard
Lady Chatterley is a French film based on D. H. Lawrence's novel, and it's really great. It's a film that was made way before MeToo, but is about a woman getting a very modern opportunity without any violence. There's something about the way that both women and men connect without violence in that film that is really amazing and moving to me. Seeing it was one of the greatest moments I've ever had in a movie theater.
Directed by: Sergio Leone | Edited by: Nino Baragli
I love epic movies, and one of my favorites is Once Upon a Time in America. That movie is really something to me. It presents life and time as an adventure. One thing about the films on my list is that the look of all of them is very nostalgic. They make you feel like the present is filled with the past and is itself already the past. It's like there's this deep dimension between you and what you're seeing on the screen, because the past is always working behind the scenes. I always think about that when I watch Once Upon a Time in America. I've seen it maybe 20 times. It's one of my favorite films.
Directed by: John Huston | Edited by: Roberto Silvi
The Dead is a movie that I love that nobody around me really knows. It's an amazing film, and I still don't really know why I cry when I watch it. Even the last time that I saw it, I watched it on my laptop, so I was watching it on this small screen, and it still completely took me away. I don't know why. Maybe it's because of what I said about the past and time in cinema. But when you watch the last scene on the stairs where Anjelica Huston hears that song, you understand everything, even if you don't know completely what's happening. You understand just by the sound of the song and the look on her and her husband's face. It's an amazing thing.
Directed by: Michael Mann | Edited by: Dov Hoenig and Arthur Schmidt
I've loved The Last of the Mohicans ever since I was a child. It's a film where the music and the acting and just everything in it always works. I think the reason why that film in particular has stuck with me is because the main character is very brave, but the people in the film are themselves very fragile. They're the last of their kind. The fact that the main character is mixed race also really made an impression on me, because I'm mixed as well. It was very touching for me to see that.
