Fall, The

If one could be content with magnificent visuals The Fall would be a 5 star experience. Made over four year in some extraordinary locations from around the globe it is a superbly staged film.

It opens in a Los Angeles hospital around the time of WWI. A bed-ridden patient, Roy (Lee Pace) befriends a five-year old girl Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), who has a broken arm. He begins telling her a story of five dashing bandits who are on a mission to kill the evil Governor Odious. We see how Alexandria, just like Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz (1939), imagines the story using things she has observed around her, including making Roy the story’s hero. This is fabulously well done, with some of the most extraordinary visuals I can recalled since Jodorowsky’s 1970 hallucinatory classic, El Topo. Given that the director Tarsem (aka Tarsem Singh) is a relative unknown one can’t help but wonder how he financed the project (it is packaged as “David Fincher and Spike Jonze present” so may be they put some of their money into it).

The downside to the film however, is that the imaginary sequences have no characterizations to speak of, the realistic part of the film, that set in the hospital and dealing with the relationship between Roy and Alexandria, is too flat in execution to have any affect. In this respect the film reminded me of Victor Erice’s 1973 masterpiece The Spirit of the Beehive which dealt with a 7 year old girl’s conflation of reality and imagination. There ain here seems to be similar the level of affect it is not realised. 

Clearly the director has some top-drawer reference points and a remarkable visual sense but he and co-writers, Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis who based the script on a novel, "Yo Ho Ho" by Valery Petrov haven’t managed to match these with a comparably insightful story.  

Available from: Umbrella Entertainment

 

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