Cast: Lee Page, Catinca Unkaru, Justine Waddell

Director: Tarsem

Screenplay: Tarsem

Running time: 1 hr 57 mins

Genre: Adventure/Drama



CRITIQUE:

It’s particularly hard to ignore the making of THE FALL, which is an epic creation in itself – 4 years in the making and shot around 28 locations in 18 different countries, globe-trotting from Los Angeles, Prague, India, Bali, South America – branded auteur Tarsem stil doesn’t know how to delegate and takes hold of the creative control of his picture. He directs, writes and splash his own moolah over this pet-project in what many call a filmmaker’s foolish decadence. But, after seeing this much-doubted cinematic toil, Tarsem’s work is nothing less than extraordinary, and all that grandiosity is worth it. This could be the year’s most artfully, gorgeously shot film, and perhaps one of the strangest, most unique piece of cinema you’ll ever see in your life.


Laborious as it was made, it’s obvious there’s a toll on its storyline: for many, it takes ages to get where it is going. For at the very crux at this film is a story about storytelling and the importance of imagination. The year is 1915, and the setting is in Los Angeles hospital; a movie stuntman Roy is injured and paralysed, taking away his profession, and whose girlfriend eloped with a co-actor. He turns suicidal and uses a local girl Alexandria, who’s also a patient who suffered from a fall, hence its title, to scout morphine tablets for him. What ensue is a bond of friendship and a wonderful evocation of the power of imagination; him as the storyteller, and his words become the pictures in the little girl’s mind.


The dreamlike sequences stand out as an achievement. The sepia-toned opening sequence in slow-motion sets the atmosphere of the film, eccentric and oddly real all the same. It brims with old-school filmmaking where everything is shot on actual location, rather than in gigantic rooms with green screens. From the harsh beauty of the deserts, to the stunning “Butterfly Island”, the blue city, to the inner labyrinth of a pyramidal structure – these are place we never thought have existed, more exotic and fantastic than your common Indiana Jones or James Bond shooting locations. Although the visual flamboyance triumphs more than its Wizard of Oz-like parallel-world story, where a group of five mystical men, the Black Bandit as its leader, journeys to avenge against Governor Odious, an evil tyrant who spawned ill-fate on the heroes – how loony, preposterous it can be, it’s in the relationship between the storyteller and the listener that remains a moving experience. The two main characters are polar to each other; he loses hope and tries to pitch his own personal tragedy to the story he’s making, while every single word matters to the child, and every single hero’s fate in the story makes sense to her. This is the emotional core of the film, and these two roles are perfectly nailed by Lee Pace as the pessimistic failed stuntman and this certain young Romanian actress Catinca Unkaru in an astonishingly, beautifully naturalistic performance. Perhaps one of the best child performances you’ll see out there. She is the film’s truest gem.



VERDICT:

With bonkers sequences, certainly this not a film for everyone – but for cinema lovers, this is truly a one-of-a-kind visualist’s experience. Flawed yet oozing with sublime perfection, THE FALL is a work of ironic beauty between the virtue of fantasy and the cruelty of reality.



RATING: A-