USA
3*
Director:
Tarsem Singh
Screenwriters:
Dan Gilroy
Nico Soultanakis
Tarsem Singh
Director of Photography:
Colin Watkinson
Running time: 117 minutes
The abilities of Tarsem Singh (or just “Tarsem”, as the credits refer to him) as storyteller have not improved since he gave us his début feature The Cell in 2000, but he has continued his fascination with the representation of images in the mind, and The Fall is filled with breathtaking visuals that will send a shiver down your spine.
It is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but few would argue with the view that The Fall contains some of the most spectacular locations ever put on film. The Pyramids, Charles Bridge, the Taj Mahal, the Blue City of Jodhpur, and many others are scattered throughout the film and compose a unique world in which the mythical story-within-a-story is set.
This particular story is told by Roy — a stuntman who is lying in his hospital bed in Los Angeles after a stunt in which he was supposed to jump from a bridge onto a horse — to a gap-toothed young Romanian girl named Alexandria, who is recovering after her family’s house was burnt to the ground. The story he tells her is “epic” in nature and concerns the adventures of five men who, having been banished by the evil Governor Odious, decide to track him down. They are a mixed bunch of fellows, from Charles Darwin who struts around in what seems to be a peacock fur coat (!) to a burly Italian explosives expert, Luigi, who wears a long, bright yellow coat.
The filmmaker’s only interesting tactic in terms of telling his story is the slow integration of elements from Roy’s own life in the development and composition of the story he tells. However, this tactic would have had much more impact if it had not been present from the very beginning. The transition between the world of the story and the world of the hospital is very often made by allowing the words of the characters of both worlds to overlap.
The film is also quite unclear about the point of view from which the story is told, and individuals from either Roy’s or Alexandria’s life feature as characters at various stages. It is fun to recognise other entities in both worlds, but we get spectacle instead of functionality. When Alexandria says that she likes elephants, Tarsem gives us a scene with an elephant swimming in tropical waters, and no more.
The Fall has been criticised for its total focus on the visual aspect while completely neglecting its content and I tend to agree. The film is rather shallow, and while the beautiful images do keep our attention, most of the time, the filmmakers have paid very little attention to the film’s narrative and music. The only piece of music that is well-chosen is the second movement from Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony”. In terms of acting, little is expected of the adventure story’s characters, since their world plays as a fragmentary, wholly imagined realm of imagined adventures, but unfortunately a great deal of the film is devoted to this story.
That being said, the story that takes place “in the present”, that is at some point during the early days of the motion picture industry, probably around the time of World War I, is not uninteresting. Alexandria is not irritating, and Roy, played by Lee Pace, is accommodating, generous, friendly and thoroughly likeable. I had some difficulty believing him as a man tortured by love, because his face is happy even when it is sad, but this was a minimal objection to his performance.
The film has a satisfactory resolution, though hardly the kind of ending we were looking for in a story that ought to be “epic”. Many images will stick with the viewer, in particular one moment when a keyhole serves as a pinhole camera and draws the shadow of a moving horse upside-down on the wall opposite. However, given the lack of substance, and despite the pleasant interaction between Lee Pace and first-time actress Catinca Untaru, the film itself has very little purpose except as a kind of travelogue about the country of India.