Director Tarsem Singh's madly inventive The Fall brings to mind two recent dark fantasies, Pan's Labyrinth and The Fountain, in the way it blurs levels of storytelling and uses hyper-stylized images that feel like paintings come to life. Also, like those two films, it is uncompromising; bleak and beautiful at the same time, supercharged by the reckless ambition of its director.
The Fall was self-financed and shot while Tarsem (who goes by first name only) was making commercials around the globe. For a film produced without major studio support, nothing about The Fall looks cheap. Instead it is a buffet of striking surreal images and dreamlike set pieces, though it should be noted these set pieces are real locations. Tarsem's ingenuity in using real-world spots is matched by his use of color, creating a palette that reflects the film's pan-global origins.
It is less cerebral than his only other feature, The Cell (which took place inside the mind of a serial killer), but no less enthralling or emotionally impacting. This is primarily because the film's fantasy is tied (however loosely) with a narrative, rather than the sadistic wallpaper of a killer's mind.
Plot in The Fall
Set in a 1920s era Los Angeles hospital, The Fall tells the story of paralyzed Hollywood stuntman Roy Walker and his relationship with fellow patient Alexandria, a small immigrant girl. Both are injured as the result of falls; Alexandria's while working in an orange grove and Roy's during a ridiculously dangerous stunt, after which he lost his girlfriend and the use of his legs.
Suicidally depressed, Roy connects with Alexandria by telling his fantastical stories. Bartering these tales for favors, Roy tricks Alexandria into pilfering morphine pills so that he can overdose and kill himself. The film then shifts between Roy and Alexandria's relationship in the hospital and Roy's colorful yarn.
Performances
Since the film is really about the relationship between these two characters, much rides on the performances.
Allowing the four year-old Catinca Untaru to improvise was a wise choice. Her lines are delivered with the same impatience of a real child interrupting a story and her sometimes incoherent babbling not only captures a child's difficulty at explaining things (especially things she misunderstands) but her bilingual nature.
If anything her performance can at times feel annoyingly real but this is balanced by Lee Pace's likable turn as stuntman Roy Walker, who reacts to his counterpart with definite ease and grace, giving his cowardly character charm.
Summary
At times the delicious beauty of the images make the film seem like nothing more than an excuse for Tarsem to display his visual panache garnered from a career directing music videos and commercials. True, the imagery is overwhelming; salvos of stirring figures and patterns hitting the viewer. It is the kind of film that provokes an art-for-the-sake-of-art defense, but the anchoring story of the cast away stuntman and precocious immigrant girl eventually gathers visceral emotional depth. In the end The Fall is a sugar rush of a film with a devastating come down.
