Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Worth
the Plunge
(The Fall, 6/30/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
I've
often complained in this column about the dispiriting sameness of commercial
movies these days, even among "indie" productions that end
up seeming to crave crossover success. Finding something genuinely different
has become like stumbling on some rare species of creature long thought
extinct. With Tarsem Singh's ravishing, overstuffed, yet spellbinding
The Fall, cinemaphiles at last get to encounter something truly
unexpected. It's the ivory-billed woodpecker of off-beat film spectacles.
The Indian-born Singh (credited
here only as "Tarsem") first made his name as a director of
commercials and music videos (such REM's "Losing My Religion").
His 2000 psychodrama The Cell got mixed reviews as a thriller
but left no doubt about its maker's flamboyant visual style, which stole
the show even from Jennifer Lopez's derrière. The Fall,
a faux children's fable that was shot in two dozen countries
and took four years to shoot, will only solidify Singh's reputation
as a visionary. Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is perhaps
the closest thing we've seen to it recently, both in terms of being
predicated on a child's-eye view of the world and its eccentric sensibility.
Elements of it are also reminiscent of The Princess Bride or,
in its enthusiasm for the transformative power of film, on Francois
Truffaut. But there's really nothing exactly like Singh's movie.
Set in a California hospital sometime
during the golden age of silent film, The Fall is about the relationship
between a child patient named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) and Tom (Lee
Pace), a lovelorn movie stuntman recuperating from a bad spill and a
broken heart. The lonely Alexandria craves company; the stuntman offers
to tell her an "epic" story in exchange for her filching drugs
for him from the hospital stores. And an epic tale it is—as imagined
by Singh, it's a titanic, po-mo confection of colorful heroes and leather-clad
villains, cast Wizard of Oz-style from faces around the hospital,
and dashed across a canvas of landscapes cribbed from every continent
on earth (OK, maybe not Antarctica).
The story is Tom's but the pictures
are supposed to be Alexandria's. One of the pleasures of the story,
in fact, lies in seeing how his version differs from hers, such as when
he describes an "Indian and his squaw" but the girl (whose
father in South Asian) imagines a sword-swinging Indian rajah. Admittedly,
there's nothing juvenile about Singh's visuals: the clever shooting
around architecture, cavernous deep-focus compositions, pulsating colors,
and clever, match-cut transitions could only come from an eye sharpened
by a love of film and informed by a few centuries of art history. The
wild costumes by designer Eiko Ishioka manage to be sophisticated and
simply iconic at the same time, but never naïve.
What is child-like is the
intensity Singh brings to the spectacle—though we've all seen images
like this before, they somehow feel fresher here. For this, in making
it seem as if the viewer is seeing a desert or a palace or a canyon
for the first time, the director has accomplished something quite rare.
Admittedly, there's an element of
sweet preciosity in The Fall that can make your teeth hurt. With
every frame is a museum-quality composition, the film teeters on the
edge of becoming more a gallery-exhibit than a story. What ultimately
makes us care anyway is the performance of Untaru—a sweet-faced
10 year-old with a fetchingly obscure (actually, Romanian) accent. Whether
she's stealing drugs or throwing oranges at her doctors, she's never
anything less than winning. That Singh had the wisdom to cast her suggests
that maybe he's more than just an eyeball with legs.
One caveat: a visual treat
like The Fall can't be appreciated on DVD. On anything less than
a room-sized screen, without theater-quality sound, Singh's spectacle
would seem like nothing more than an overstretched perfume commercial.
To enjoy this one, there's no option but to get down to your local theater...before
the plunge ends.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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