What stands out most about Tarsem’s epic fantasia The Fall is not its cinematography’s magnificent beauty, but rather its audacity to reshuffle its own cards at will, demanding us to follow a story that’s malleable. Admittedly made up by the film’s main character as a con, the story-within-the-story that is The Fall’s main attraction is disjointed, irrational and silly. It is also brilliantly revelatory.
The Fall is a story about the unlikely bond between Roy—an actor who broke his legs performing a dangerous stunt during a movie shoot, played to almost perfection in his anguish by Pushing Daisies’ Lee Pace—and a little Romanian girl named Alexandria, played by five-year-old Catinca Utaru in an impressive first-time performance. Meeting in a hospital in the early days of motion pictures, the bed-ridden Roy dupes Alexandria into fetching him morphine so he could commit suicide, by telling her an epic fable of six wronged men—a masked bandit, an Indian warrior, a powerful mystic, an explosives expert, an ex-slave and Charles Darwin—forming a fellowship to embark on a quest to kill the evil Governor Odious.
This particular tale starts off as a trippy, almost comic booky adventure—full of swooning Calvin Klein shots and baroque costumes—but as Roy grows more impatient waiting for his own demise, the story he’s telling becomes more erratic and tragic. Because of this puppet-string relationship between the two worlds, the fable isn’t an actual story we’re meant to follow (Roy is making it up as he goes along, after all); rather, it’s an extension of this unlikely father-daughter relationship brewing between Roy and Alexandria. As the bond between the two morphs from spinner-listener to one where Alexandria has to save Roy’s soul, Roy’s fairy tale—or more specifically, the re-visioning of that fairy tale at every step—visualizes the tug-of-war going on between them. Roy just wants to please Alexandria at first, changing elements of the story to suit her liking, but by the end they’ve both grown dependent of the fable to dictate their future. Will it end happily ever after, or tragically cautionary? It’s up to how deep Roy lets Alexandria in.
The Fall’s beauty is, all said, undeniable. Plenty of films can capture beautiful landscapes into gorgeous images, but few can attain such perfection in almost every shot and find more ways to enhance them. In one set-piece, the fellowship arrives in Odious’ blue kingdom—a castle surrounded by a blue city. It was not built by the production and no CG was used. Tarsem actually gave away blue paint to the citizens of a shanty town and asked them to paint their houses blue. When we first catch a glimpse of this blue kingdom, there is an awe of discovery, as if this blue city exists in some exotic part of the world and we have stumbled upon it via Tarsem’s lenses.
Those who have seen his previous feature The Cell know of how comfortably Tarsem\'s background in music videos and commercials works with these surreal visions that he likes to put in his movies. His command of wardrobe, the art department and the director of photography is uncanny. The J-Lo thriller was unfortunately a misfire, not for its weak thriller plot, but because it misused the realm of a character’s subconscious as a fashion show. It was simply one weird image after another with nothing for the audience to anchor emotions to, which grew tiresome fast and is a waste of a good premise. Though having the appearance of an epic, The Fall is in truth a very intimate character drama. Unlike The Cell, here the Dali-esque images are close-knit. The more we want these two to survive their days at the hospital, the more stake we put into Roy’s fiction.
As the final charge against Governor Odious is set, the last gasps of this fable is told amidst a heart-wrenching duel between Roy and Alexandria regarding the worth of love and mortality. Tarsem’s success in tugging at the emotional impacts of both worlds and making them seamless is not the feat of a director who only concerns himself with beauty shots. The fact that the two leads have a chemistry as memorable as the film’s unreal photographs shows how accomplished this film really is. The Fall suggests that cinema holds a power to affect the human soul, for both maker and spectator.
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