I had a chance to catch Tarsem's (The Cell, R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" video) new self-financed film, The Fall at the HAMMER Museum a couple of weeks ago. It's a dazzling grown-up fantasy about Alexandria, a young immigrant girl (CatincaUntaru, destined for Haley Joel Osmet-ish adoration) who is told a fairy tale story by Roy Walker, a suicidal paraplegic stuntman (Pushing DaisiesLee Pace) in an early 20th C. California hospital.
One woman at the QnA gushed to Tarsem that the film was an arrival on the order of the Beatles coming to America and while the film is fantastic, it's not that good. Still, it's a visual feast for the eyes, having been shot on location in over 24 countries. Tarsem said that he kept shooting until continuing would have meant selling the house, at which point he said "we're finished". The result is my favorite kind of story: a story about storytelling. Roy, awash in self-pity makes a terribly unreliable narrator and Alexandria's youth makes her a sometimes maddeningly confused listener. This explains such wonderful turns like Alexandria's vision of an Indian being a grand warrior of the subcontinent, while Roy goes on about how he has "had many squaws".
Interesting side note is that Tarsem's sort of evil. Since the film was shot before Pace's lead turn on Pushing Daises, he was an unknown (his most notable role was as transexual Calpernia Adams in Soldier's Boy) and the director told his cast and crew that Pace really had no use of his legs. One wheelchair-bound crewmember refuses still to speak to Tarsem, but he stands by his decision, saying that it "changed the whole tone of the set in a way that made the film work".
I'm one of like three people in the world who hated Pan's Labyrinth, a movie this film will draw inevitable comparisons to. But while both films feature young headstrong girls living in both a thrilling fantasy world and a dark everyday reality, The Fall's Alexandra has a plucky gumption that you root for. She's not content to be seduced by her imagination. She wrestles with it, with Roy's adult self-pity and without embracing sentimentality (the film is rated, rather unfairly, an R in the States, while Germany for instance, gave it their equivalent of a G rating) the film manages a life-affirming tone. It's a beautiful film that wisely gives the audience enough breathing room that really can get lost in the fantasy.
