The Fall

I’ll have to admit that I don’t really get the genre of fantasy, so I’m not a good one to review The Fall. (I was the only person on the planet who didn’t much care for Pan’s Labyrinth.) The plot centers on a little girl, Alexandra, in a hospital recovering from a broken arm, which she has to keep awkwardly elevated throughout the film. She is from a family of immigrant Romanians who are pick fruit in California. In the hospital she befriends Roy, a young stunt man in the brand new film industry, who has apparently attempted suicide (which we may have seen the film’s opening sequence, though it is not entirely clear) and broken both legs in the process. The young man begins to weave an elaborate fantasy story (he calls it “epic”) involving five exotic warriors who have been stranded on a tiny island by a King Odious whom they have all vowed to kill. (One of the warriors is Charles Darwin (???)) The intermixing of fantasy and reality begins early as we see characters from the hospital appearing in the story, including Roy himself. Eventually Alexandra herself appears as Roy’s sidekick. It has been suggested that although the story is Roy’s, the visuals come from Alexandra’s five-year-old mind, but toward the end of the tale, the princess is Roy’s former girlfriend and Odious is the leading man from the film Roy was last involved in. This sort of blending was probably started with the last sequence of The Wizard of Oz and continues unabated to this day.

The film turns dark when it becomes apparent that Roy’s primary motive in weaving this tale for Alexandra is to persuade her to steal morphine pills from the hospital’s pharmacy so that he can kill himself. After his attempt fails, the story turns very dark indeed.

There are many aspects in which the title comes into play. The opening sequence depicts a staged fall from a railroad bridge which may be where Roy was injured. Alexandra falls and suffers a brain injury as she tries to steal morphine pills for Roy in the hospital’s pharmacy. We also see Roy falling into despair. Much has been made of the film’s fabulous visual style, but it should also be recalled that most of that visual spectacle is a pretty ruthless manipulation of a five-year-old girl. Surely the style of the film is implicated by Roy’s motives and we don’t have a pure paean to visual filmmaking. Or not.

The director and writer, Tarsem Singh, is a very successful director of commercials and music videos (that background could have been inferred from the film’s visual manner). He apparently sandwiched between his commercial work and financed it with his own money. It was filmed on 28 international locations. You have to admire Tarsem’s gumption, but I can’t help wish it could have been applied to a project of more substance than this.

The most stunning visual of the film, at least for me, occurs when the warriors escape the island by riding on the back of a swimming elephant. It is mostly filmed underwater so that we see the elephant swimming. Of course, it makes no sense whatever that an elephant would arrive on the scene and save them all, but it was cool to see. I also admired the use of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony as the theme music.

The Fall has been called a fairytale, but not one for children. But being a fairytale also limits its appeal to adults, so it’s hard to imagine the film’s natural audience.

Oh, man, I just figured out how to embed YouTube movie trailers! New feature!