The Fall, Tarsem

This is an ambitious, enjoyable, visually impressive movie with a great, natural performance by Catinca Untaru.

The Fall owes a lot to Alejandro Jodorowsky (esp. Holy Mountain), Terry Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen (almost the definition of “ambitious failure”), Cinema Paradiso, and The Princes Bride.

Short synopsis with no real spoilers to speak of: After a gorgeous set of opening credits/prologue we meet a very young girl with a severely broken arm, the daughter of an immigrant orange picker in 1920s Los Angeles. Played by Catinca Untaru she gives a wonderfully natural performance. Even Jodelle Ferland in Tideland, good as she was, was obviously acting, with a funny accent and complete awareness of the camera and crisp delivery of lines. Not so with Untaru who has a real accent, speaks while all around her, or at the ceiling, repeating phrases and getting words wrong. She’s completely believable, and natural and fun to watch. I wouldn’t think Tarsem would be actor’s director. In fact, for everyone else in the movie, it looks like they’re pretty much on their own, to sink or swim in proportion to their chops. Tarsem’s strength is visual wonderment and The Fall delivers a ton of it. Shot in a dozen or so countries, a crippled stunt man tells a long fairytale to the young girl about a group of exiles who try to kill the evil ruler Odious. Most of those characters are barely sketched out, and frequently have little to do.

That’s ok. The real plot takes place in the real-world hospital. Some things happen that make little sense, but at other times there is remarkable subtlety of story-telling going on in the hospital. The audience seldom gets more information than the young girl would get from eavesdropping. As the mental state of the stuntman deteriorates, so does the fairytale, getting darker and more gruesome as it goes.

This is the kind of movie I love. In fact, looking back at my review of Tideland I see I’m using a lot of the same enthusiastic phrases I used there. I was already taken in by the movie as it wrapped up, but the coda of the film took me completely by surprise, with a 2 or 3 minute montage of early, dangerous filmwork. Spike Lee did a similar thing with black-face performances at the end of Bamboozled, and it works just as well here.

There are probably several things that are easy to pick apart about the movie, but it’s still been about the most engrossing thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s also not the only movie I’ve watched lately, and not even the only one shot by a visual artist who decided to become a movie director. I recently saw all three of the “delirious fictions” of William Klein, loved them all, and will try to post something on them before week’s end.