Two films – one marriage. André Cayatte’s ambitious two-part cycle Anatomy of a Marriage invites viewers to witness the drama of love and daily life from two perspectives: the wife’s and the husband’s. The unique structure originated with François Truffaut’s proposal that Cayatte attempt an experimental narrative: to tell the same couple’s story twice, from both sides, revealing how deeply personal perception can diverge even when sharing the same life. The idea immediately recalls Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon – a film that famously questioned the existence of objective truth – only here the mystery is not a crime, but the emotional miscommunication, silences, and unspoken expectations within a marriage.
Françoise is a sensitive, idealistic woman striving to preserve her identity and her love within the family. Jean-Marc, meanwhile, is a man trying to meet the expectations of society and his household, suppressing his emotions and acting according to what is demanded of him. He is weighed down by the burden of conformity: duties, norms, and social roles that often override personal desires. These parallel narratives form a subtle document of postwar France, revealing shifting notions of family, gender roles, and intimacy.
This two-part work reveals how much lies between spoken words and unspoken feelings, reminding us that every love story carries at least two truths. With subtle precision, Cayatte shows how the same events can be lived in radically different ways – not because one side lies, but because each sees only what they are ready to see. This humanist perspective remains powerfully relevant today, in both cinema and life. The diptych continues the conversation launched in Richard Linklater’s New Wave, part of Scanorama’s “Crossing Europe” program, about the French New Wave’s mission to transform cinema – a legacy that still resonates. One of the movement’s great inspirations was François Truffaut, whose proposal was realized by André Cayatte, a less flamboyant but no less important fellow traveler of that era.
