The Fall - 2006 - Tarsem Singh
‘Fantasy film is just escapism’ say the skeptics and critics of the genre.
Wrong.
For a film to be successful you have to invest in the world of the story; you have to become part of it. Its function is to transport viewers away from their cinema seats to the world on screen, rendering all films escapist to a certain extent.
The thing about fantasy is that it transports us to a world completely different from our own.
Oh, wrong again?
In actuality, fantasy cinema merely presents our own social anxieties and problems metaphorically. In the same way that children create ghost stories for old buildings, and Freud believed dreams help us to solve problems in our daily lives, escaping to a fantasy world, whether it be on screen or in our own heads, can be therapeutic.
This is the idea presented in Tarsem Singh’s (credited simply as Tarsem) beautiful ‘fairytale’ adventure The Fall. The film follows the story of a young innocent girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) who befriends a paralysed stuntman named Roy Walker (Pushing Dasies’ Lee Pace) as they both recover in a 1920’s Los Angeles hospital.
Roy agrees to tell Alexandria an ‘epic tale’ of bandits and indians in return for her stealing morphine tablets to ease his pain. As Roy tells Alexandria the story, incorporating plot strands that reflect his own life, her imagination brings it vividly to life, using people she has met on her travels round the hospital as inspiration for the characters; Roy becomes the heroic masked bandit and Alexandria his daughter.
However, Roy’s ulterior motive for befriending Alexandria is to help him acquire enough morphine to attempt suicide. His depression, and the influence of the medication causes the line between reality and fantasy to blur and as his mental state darkens the tale begins to spiral downwards.
The only way to ‘save Roy’s soul’ is for Alexandria to enter the story as narrator and ensure the happy ending for the blue bandit, ultimately helping his real life counterpart to come to terms with, and deal with his personal issues.
From the monochrome opening montage, through a multitude of locations to the stylistic animated surgery sequence this is a stunningly beautiful film. Purportedly shot over a period of four years incorporating footage from over 20 countries, the settings jump from barren desert to lush green pastures to reinforce the desired dreamlike quality to the tale.
You could take a still from virtually any scene within the movie and hang it on your wall as a piece of artwork (trying to whittle down the choice of images to accompany this article was nigh on impossible!) Unlike my previously reviewed Brick, this is the kind of film you can put on in the background, the kind of film that you can let wash over you as you indulge in the vivid colours and exquisitely constructed cinematography.
Under scrutiny, the story doesn’t fully hold up and can be easily unpicked, but that minor fault is soon forgiven due to the heart of the film.
The performances from Pace and Untaru are honest and candid. Tarsem chose to shoot the scenes between the two chronologically, and with the camera crew obscured from view, so their relationship develops before our eyes.
Untaru’s adorable broken english means she is a delight to watch, lighting up any scene she is in, and her characters’ relationship with Roy is genuinely touching.
This is a beautifully quaint, visually stunning, globetrotting fairytale adventure. If you choose to take a chance on one dvd purchase this year, make it The Fall.
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