"The Fall" - Cinema Fantastique...

A feature story in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section this morning (May 11) about "The Fall," a new independent film by Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, was absolutely tantalizing, and so I made time to see it late this afternoon.  It is what I would call "cinema fantastique" - that is, a work of rich imagination, full of real special effects (as the article emphasizes, no CGI), real stunt people doing real stunts of great audacity, filmed in a large variety of extraordinary locations, weaving a fantastic tale, and very well acted by all the relatively unknown leads.

A real standout for me was Lee Pace, playing the male lead role of Roy, a movie stuntman hospitalized as a result of an accident while filming involving a fall from a bridge.  He lies in the hospital, paralyzed from the waist down, pretty much giving up hope of recovering (it's the days of silent film, early 20th century), and actually suicidal at contemplating a life in a wheel-chair.  Actor Pace is a very handsome man with a very expressive face and a warm, charming voice.  Another young hospital patient, played by Catinca Untaru (an incredibly gift little kid), wanders into his room, and he devises a plan to enlist her in his suicide by persuading her to fetch him a bottle of morphine pills from the dispensary.  To do this, he begins to tell her an engrossing story, in which she imagines him and her as characters - indeed, as father and daughter -- and through the story he "seduces" her into being his accomplice.  I won't say more along those lines - don't want to do a plot spoiler here.

But I will say that the depiction of Roy's imaginary story is vividly enacted, with glamorous sets, splendid costumes, and wonderful music.  (The original music of Krishna Levy makes up some of the score, but also effective use is made at several points of the Allegretto (second movement) from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.) 

As is very much the trend in recent times, the story is enacted without much explicit explanation or back story, so the audience is thrown into the middle of events and doesn't figure everything out about the underlying plot until the end of the film.  Happily, however, Tarsem does not go in for some of the tricks I detest - that is, playing with time or fooling with the audience.   What is most interesting, of course, is that in the grand tradition of "The Wizard of Oz," the characters in Roy's story are enacted by real people in his life, some from the staff of the hospital, others from his world as a film stuntman.  (Would it be giving away too much to say that the evil Prince Odious, the villain of the story, is played by the same actor who is the director of Roy's film?  Remember in "The Wizard of Oz" when the Wizard turned out to be the peddler of patent medicine in "real life"?)

This little indy film was, according to The Times article, entirely funded by its director, Tarsem, who could not get any studio or major film investor interested.  Nobody who read the script could figure out whether it was comedy or tragedy, or could figure out a particular category in which to market it.  In other words, this is a singular film.  It has comical moments, tragic moments, moments of great emotion, moments of action-adventure, but fits in no convenient niche.  Tarsem spent years looking for a distributor.  He shot it on a shoestring, but it doesn't look like it.  (I saw only one or two editing glitches.)  Spike Jonze, listed as one of the "presenters" of the film together with David Fincher, speculated that had a major studio shot this script it would have been an $80 million movie.  Of course, Tarsem had very little, but as a maker of commercials and music videos, had had access to the technology to do things on the cheap, he enlisted unknown actors who I presume worked at the minimum, and he didn't have to construct any sets because he was able to use contacts to get the use of an old Victorian-era abandoned hospital in South Africa for the "real life" scenes, and all the fantasy scenes were shot out of doors (with minor brief exceptions) in existing locations that he found through his commercial work.

My bottom line - This is, as I said at the outset, cinema fantastique - a case of a determined, imaginative film-makers using his own resources to bring to the screen his own vision of a story, and doing it with real style.  Is it a "great film"?  No, more akin to a grand entertainment reflecting one man's imagination, a multicultural trip (you'll get that point when you see the film), and, in it's final scenes, extraordinarily moving in showing the love-bond that grows up between Roy and the little girl.

At present, the film plays in Manhattan in only two theaters - one of the smaller boxes at the 25-screen AMC theater in Times Square, and the Sunrise Cinema out on East Houston Street, a favorite spot for independent films.  It deserves to be playing many more places.  Perhaps there is a bit too much violence to take small children (nightmares are likely), but older children and everybody else would find this a wonderful experience.  And I hope it surfaces on DVD some day!!!

[After writing this, I went back to the Friday edition of The Times to see the regular review of the film.  I disagree with it profoundly.  It is a brief dismissive piece, almost as if to say that the critic resented being sent to review a low budget independent film.  The critic claimed it was a bore.  I was totally engaged, and I sat in a nearly full matinee audience that also seemed to be totally engaged.  Sure, there were signs of low budget, like a few editing blips I noted, but I thought all-in-all that it was an enjoyable experience.  Maybe The Times shouldn't send resentful stringers to review films....]