Steve Erickson
The Fall qualifies as a grand folly, an indulgence in excess that had become rare by the 2000s. After its director Tarsem made his mark with music videos (including R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”) and commercials, he moved up to feature filmmaking with The Cell, a surreal horror film in which a detective enters a serial killer’s mind. His follow-up The Fall deepened its themes about the thin barrier between fantasy and the real world, with far more emotional conviction. It pivots on the idea that an adult man and young girl could create a shared set of mental images, if not a story, much as it seamlessly edits footage shot in numerous countries.
The Fall’s fairytale undertones are established by the onscreen title “Los Angeles, once upon a time.” Set in the 1910s, it takes place in the hospital where paraplegic stuntman Roy (Lee Pace) lies bedridden after an injury on set. He passes the time by telling stories to Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), an immigrant girl whose arm was injured in an arson attack on her family’s home. Roy dreams up an alter ego, an androgynous bandit sporting a mask, and pictures people from his life, played by the same actors, as storybook heroes fighting Captain Odious (Daniel Caltagirone). For him, this storytelling has a transactional dimension: he flatters Alexandria, encouraging her to steal morphine from the pharmacy so that he can kill himself. He feels betrayed by his ex-girlfriend, who abandoned him in favor of the actor he served by performing his deadly stunt.
This film was a labor of love for Tarsem, who spent six years on a shoot built around his schedule making commercials around the world. Remarkably, the budget was only $30 million; it looks far more expensive. Particularly in its fantasy scenes, The Fall evinces an “every frame a painting” aesthetic. In the desert, the blue sky and orange sand are impossibly deep. Yet no matter how much they may have been altered in post-production, The Fall looks like a product of the analog era. Instead of projecting a fantastic world onto greenscreens for actors to react against, Tarsem took after his characters and roamed the globe in search of fitting locations.
There’s no attempt to bring out the specifics of the real-life settings, which included India, Bali, Argentina and France. The hospital, set in Los Angeles, was actually shot in Cape Town, South Africa. The fantasy scenes are given a vividness that dwarfs the film’s version of reality. (Even their sound mix is much clearer.) Yet they prove to be a combination of images from Roy and Alexandria’s mental stock of imagery and lived experience, jumbled together as their minds merge in the act of storytelling. The film dreams up an imaginary setting based on the characters of its time. Untaru’s performance is a decisive element, although perhaps not for intended reasons: while her broken English may be realistic, her accent muddies the dialogue, placing even more emphasis on visual communication.
If anything, The Fall can be too pretty for its own good. Tarsem’s direction tries to overwhelm the spectator, with extreme long shot after extreme long shot of palaces, courtyards, and the sea. His camera gazes up in awe as people climb up and down a labyrinth or an elephant takes a swim. The sensual beauty of the fantasy scene’s colors contrasts with the brown cinematography and cramped camera angles of the 1910s scenes, reflecting the confinement of the hospital. But the film’s real agenda becomes clearer by the halfway point. The holes in its characters’ imaginary scenario get more and more apparent. Reality seeps through, albeit in increasingly unsettling ways. The shape of a pinned butterfly is mirrored by a beach and its surrounding sea. When Roy passes out from a drug overdose, the cinematography turns white.
The Fall was not a commercial success, only earning back $3.7 million worldwide in its 2008 release, two years after it was completed. While Tarsem’s subsequent career has gone well enough for him to complete four more features (as well as Lady Gaga’s “911” video, which pays tribute to Sergei Paradjanov), his first two films did not set him on a path towards acclaim and constant work. Until MUBI acquired the current restoration, it was unavailable on streaming and long out of print on Blu-Ray. Still, as so often happens, its initial failure led to adoption as a cult film. Potentially accessible to a family audience, its downbeat story, violent images, and artiness prevented it from finding one. But Tarsem’s devotion to cinema comes through in every shot. The choice to end with a montage of film stunts seethes with an ambivalence towards the danger inherent in making movies. The period when a film this eccentric could be made on a 8-figure budget, with an eye on reaching a wide audience, seems almost as distant as the silent era.
“The Fall” streams Friday on MUBI.
