STARRING: Catinca Untaru, Lee
Pace, Emil Hostina, Justine Waddell
2008, 117 Minutes, Directed by:
Tarsem Singh
The
Fall is a “story-within-a-story” movie, like
Labyrinth or The Never-Ending Story or even The
Wizard of Oz for that matter. We witness storyteller and listener during the
very act of creation.
It’s a durable and fascinating genre because it highlights
the “how” and “why” of the stories we invent. Weak entries into the genre jerk
us around with “it’s all just a dream” or by making trite, obvious connections
between the storyteller’s life and the story, Mulholland Dr. possibly the
best recent example of the genre, in which the protagonist’s hopes, shames, and
life is abstracted into an elaborate and heavily symbolic feature-length fantasy
sequence.
So we come to The Fall,
in which the storyteller is a movie stuntman from 1915 and the listener is a
little immigrant girl he meets while recovering in a hospital. The
story-within-the-story follows five adventurers seeking vengeance on the evil
Governor Odious. The adventurers come from different historical eras and seem to
move freely from era to era. Like Pasolini in The Arabian Nights, director
Tarsem has sought out real locations – real palaces and deserts – and they feel
more lived-in and exotic than new ones built on a computer.
Tarsem was behind
The Cell, another movie in which vast and amazing
imagery is used to illustrate a story that may not be quite deserving of all the
effort. Similarly, The Fall’s storyteller makes an elaborate and heavily
symbolic story out of his involvement in a simple love triangle.
But maybe a
too-elaborate story would just get in the way; The Fall is more about
storytelling and symbols. We don’t see the storyteller’s story so much as we see
how the little girl sees it; when the stuntman tells her about Indians, wigwams,
and squaws, the girl has never seen American Indians, so she pictures a Hindu in
a turban. When he tells her things she doesn’t like, she talks him into changing
them. We back up, revise, review. Will the storyteller exaggerate his woes or
will he seek catharsis? And all the while we’re watching bizarre and fanciful
landscapes shot in 28 countries, including a bottomless Escher-esque stairwell .
. .
The
Fall is a “story-within-a-story” movie, like