The Reel Critic

Author: Jason Gutierrez

Movie: The Fall
Director: Tarsem Singh
Starring: Catinca Untaru and Lee Pace

We have finally reached that point in the semester, the one where we are slowly drowning in a sea of work. At least, that's how it is for most of the people I know. We're too busy to even make that forty-five minute drive to Burlington to go to the movies. Of course, we could stay here. There is a movie theater in town, after all. But seeing "High School Musical 3" is about as appealing to me as having someone drop a cinder block on my chest from the fifth floor of BiHall. We may not have enough time for a trip to the movies, but everyone needs a study break, and Tarsem Singh's new film, "The Fall," is just the kind of escapist entertainment that can take your mind off of that ten-page political science paper due in a few days.

"The Fall" was released with relatively little fanfare earlier this summer, and came out on DVD in September. It tells the story of Alexandra (the plucky Catinca Untaru), a young girl spending time in a 1920s Hollywood hospital after a fall from a ladder while picking fruit with her migrant worker parents. There she meets Roy (the fantastic Lee Pace of "Pushing Daisies" fame), a paralyzed and heartbroken stuntman who spins a fantastical yarn of cowboys, Indians, ex-slaves, Italian explosive experts and Charles Darwin for her. However, Roy's intentions aren't as simple as entertaining a young girl. Singh utilizes a narrative device similar to films like "The Princess Bride," framing the story-within-a-story by interrupting it and moving back to reality at various points throughout the film. Here, Roy stops his story at crucial moments, forcing Alexandra to raid the morphine supply before he continues his tale.

Singh (working under the name Tarsem) is one of the best and most renowned directors of commercials and music videos, and here his visual flair is on full display. He presents us with underwater shots of swimming elephants, gorgeous desert vistas, a city painted blue and a scene that involves intersecting walls of zig-zagging staircases. Every single shot stuns the viewer with its beauty and awe-inspiring grandeur. What makes the film so remarkable is that none of these visuals utilize computer-generated effects, not even the shot of a man emerging from a burning tree. That little nugget of information, when combined with the fact that this film was self-financed by Tarsem, shot on twenty-six locations in over eighteen countries and took four years to complete, makes the mere existence of this film a minor miracle.

When put up against such majestic and fantastical backdrops, it is sometimes easy for actors and characters to get lost in the fray, but Tarsem manages to ensure that the human element is never overwhelmed by the visuals. One is never given a privileged position over the other, and Tarsem is fortunate to have two extremely appealing leads in Pace and the ten-year-old Untaru. Tarsem is careful to ensure that the characters he presents are fully realized and complex - a novel attribute considered secondary in most fantasy films.

Tarsem isn't mining new territory here. As I mentioned before, he leans on classic fantasy films like "The Princess Bride," the 1950s epics of David Lean and the Bollywood films of his home country. It is Tarsem's vivid visual flourishes that set him apart. At the time of this film's release some critics held this virtue against him, claiming that the unrestrained visual flairs were gaudy and pretentious. These criticisms seem to miss the point, though. "The Fall," like Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," is a fairy tale for adults. It presents us with a fantastic world and asks us not only to remember what it was like to have the imagination of a child, but also to try and regress to that state of innocence and wonder. Tarsem has managed to capture the purity and power of a child's imagination, a feat that demands respect and makes "The Fall" the perfect film for escaping the realities of impending deadlines.