I used to be a pretty big fan of the original Axe Cop comic, where a 28-year-old artist illustrates the strange and rambling stories spun by his five-year-old brother. 2006’s The Fall has a feel like that, as a partly paralyzed man in a hospital in 1920’s L.A. improvises an epic tale of adventure to entertain a young girl who is a fellow patient. He has ulterior motives for this, as he coerces her to steal the bottle of morphine pills from the depository with which he intends to end his life.
This is a picture that walks an odd line between the dark and the whimsical. On occasion, it wanders a tad too far over the line in one direction or the other. I was not surprised the director is Tarsem Singh, as the visual style feels part of the zeitgeist of his The Cell. One of the most memorably icky images I recall from that film is the horse cut cleanly into slices which separate apart as if on giant, vertically-aligned microscope slides. The Fall has a dead horse being raised from a river in the opening credits, just as the director’s name appears on screen. Really, what is it with this guy and horses?
Fortunately, he has a great eye for many things that are not horsies which have shuffled off the mortal coil. I wasn’t sure what was entirely real and what was augmented by CGI, but the locations are astonishing. It was shot on four continents, and the internet tells me some of the countries included are India, Egypt, Namibia, Turkey, Indonesia, China, Cambodia, Italy, Paris and Spain. Some of these are obvious, such as shots of the Great Wall of China, the Taj Majal or the Eiffel Tower.
Others are unfamiliar to most, or were at least not known to me when I originally saw the picture in its original theatrical run. In my opinion, the most stunning is Chand Baori, a stepwell in India, that is like a negative impression left by one of those Aztec pyramids if somebody had shoved one upside-down into the earth. It is so stunning as to beggar belief it is an actual location. One location is startling not necessarily because it is a desert of white sand, but because the facial features of a character in a previous shot transition perfectly to shapes in the distance there.
There is a great deal of magic to be found here, whether it be the surreal imagery or the magical realism nature of the tale told by Lee Pace from the bed to which he is confined. The young girl he befriends is Catinca Untaru, and we see the stories he tells as they play out in her imagination, a world which is populated by various people around the hospital.
The main characters are five men seeking revenge against the hilariously named Governor Odious. Each of our heroes has a double in the real world outside the story. It makes sense these are the people Untaru imagines as these characters, as she sees them every day. Pace appears in his own story as the Masked Bandit, who lost his true love to the man. Robin Smith is a fellow patient and, in her imagination, an explosives expert. Ice vendor Marcus Wesley is cast in her mind as a slave who freed himself from Odious’s bondage. Orange vendor Jeetu Verma becomes an Indian warrior. The last is orderly Leo Bill as…Charles Darwin. No, really. He wants revenge for Odious sending him a dead specimen of an especially rare butterfly.
Elements from around the hospital find themselves into the visuals in other ways. I especially like how an X-ray technician clad in an admittedly terrifying radiation suit becomes Odious’s warriors. The story also mutates as it goes along, with humorous bits like Pace forgetting the Masked Bandit is Spanish, and so he becomes French at one point. Untaru also helps to shape the narrative, and the funniest moment is when she protests a priest cannot be evil, resulting in an abrupt and extreme change to a character’s personality.
It is intriguing how we only know what Untaru knows at any given time. When she loses track of overlapping conversations, we only glean information from what is clear to her. This subjectivity becomes literal in a couple of scenes, such as one where she lies in a bed and looks at a picture. From her perspective, she closes one eye and then the other, and the image jumps from one position to the other. Another moment seems to be a meta comment on cinema, when a keyhole becomes a camera obscura, projecting an upside-down image on the opposite wall. Of course, the image is of a horse. Notably, the horse is alive. An interesting development has her interjecting herself in the story, emerging from the bag Smith has been carrying and looking like a mini-me version of the Masked Bandit. A laugh-out-loud line is Smith’s reaction: “No wonder the bag was so heavy.”
A fascinating stylistic detour is a short sequence of stop motion in a style so reminiscent of the Brothers Quay that I was stunned to discover it was instead the work of a different set of twin animators, Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein. I guess creepy stop motion is somehow inherently the domain of twins.
This is the first movie I have seen for which I felt a 4K presentation was justified. Such footage as that captured underwater of elephants swimming is even more jaw-dropping at this resolution.
I was pleasantly surprised to find how much more of merit I found in The Fall nearly twenty years after I saw it the first time. At that time, I thought the visuals were gorgeous, if a bit overwhelming, but weren’t in service to a story. I now see how wrong I was, and that this is more than a bit like a more adult Princess Bride. Superficially, this may appear to also be a work for all ages, though this does earn its R rating.
Dir: Tarsem Singh
Starring Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru, Justine Waddell
Watched on Umbrella Australia UHD blu-ray