The Fall (2006)
Directed by Tarsem Singh
In a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman begins to tell a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm, a fantastic story about 5 mythical heroes. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality starts to blur as the tale advances.
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What critics say influenced The Fall
The way in which the story unfolds evokes The Wizard of Oz and The Princess Bride , but the synthesis of the elements marks The Fall as vastly inferior to either.
I want to say, too, that The Fall is unlike any movie I’ve ever seen before, except that it reminds me, just a bit, of The Princess Bride : the outrageous tropes of adventure stories -- pirates and revenge and strange and mysterious characters and unlikely plot twists -- get sent up here, too, in the story Roy spins for Alexandria.
"The Fall" is what you'd get if you told a fiendishly gifted graphic illustrator the plot of "The Princess Bride" and sent him off to come up with his own version.
The Princess Bride, Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Jodorowsky’s Fando and Lis are all ingredients for Tarsem’s spellbinding movie (unfortunately saddled with a 15 cert for strong violence) but kids and adults sat in front of this are unlikely to forget its mystical atmosphere, achingly detailed visuals (big screen or HD viewings are mandatory), and beguiling story.
Bonus: Although audiences may be tempted to draw parallels between “The Fall” and any number of fantasy films—including “The Princess Bride,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Fifth Element,” the work of Terry Gilliam and “The Wizard of Oz”—the storyline was directly inspired by an unexpected source: the 1981 Bulgarian film “Yo Ho Ho.”
A fantasy told to a sickly child, The Fall has been compared to Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987), but it has just as much in common with Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006), while its exuberant imagery evokes the visionary works of Alejandro Jodorowsky â specifically Fando y Lis (1968) for the live birds flying out of a dead man's mouth, El Topo (1970) for the masked bandit and child, and The Holy Mountain (1973) for the group quest and kaleidoscopic pageantry.
The circumstances of the filmmaking keep coming up alongside the filmmaking itself, not because The Fall is only impressive with asterisks describing its technique, but to demonstrate the filmmaker's unconventional and dedicated approach to material that could be as familiar as watching The Wizard of Oz on cable.
Alexandria draws on people she knows in order to visualize her story much in the same way that Dorothy looked to people on the farm as she imagined the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion in The Wizard of Oz.
It doesn't take long to realize that the story reflects both of their lives, originating from his movie background and wounded romanticism and filtered through her imagination and experiences (complete with characters cast from her life, a la "The Wizard of Oz").
Like Pan's Labyrinth and The Wizard of Oz, Tarsem's film dives deep into the imagination of a child, taking characters from her real world and transplanting them into the fantasy.
Cowriter (with Dan Gilroy ("Two for the Money") and Nico Soultanakis ("The Cell")/director Tarsem Singh ("The Cell") spent sixteen years scouting locations in twenty-eight countries, then another four years creating his own visually spectacular, culturally peculiar version of "The Wizard of Oz." Equal part bedtime story and contemporary art museum installation, "The Fall" is unlike anything you've ever seen.
The way in which the story unfolds evokes The Wizard of Oz and The Princess Bride , but the synthesis of the elements marks The Fall as vastly inferior to either.
For a movie with such audacious, lush, and inventive images (and, yes, production backstory), the story and themes of The Fall bring to mind a whole lot of other audacious, inventive films, including several by Terry Gilliam (particularly The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and the little-seen, mostly-reviled Tideland ), and even a couple of recent ones about the transformative power of storytelling and mythmaking ( Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow ).
So The Fall encourages thematic comparisons with del Toro 's Pan's Labyrinth and especially Terry Gilliam 's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Tideland .
For a more interesting failure along near-identical lines, check out The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , which, even with a young Sarah Polley, at least has energy and lucidity.
While "The Fall" might not be everyone's cup of tea due to the eccentric way it blends epic fantasy with brooding reality, the scope of Tarsem's imagination and vision and the delightful pairing of Pace and Untaru creates an eclectic fantasy tale unlike anything we've since Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."
A fantasy told to a sickly child, The Fall has been compared to Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987), but it has just as much in common with Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006), while its exuberant imagery evokes the visionary works of Alejandro Jodorowsky â specifically Fando y Lis (1968) for the live birds flying out of a dead man's mouth, El Topo (1970) for the masked bandit and child, and The Holy Mountain (1973) for the group quest and kaleidoscopic pageantry.
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A fantasy told to a sickly child, The Fall has been compared to Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987), but it has just as much in common with Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006), while its exuberant imagery evokes the visionary works of Alejandro Jodorowsky â specifically Fando y Lis (1968) for the live birds flying out of a dead man's mouth, El Topo (1970) for the masked bandit and child, and The Holy Mountain (1973) for the group quest and kaleidoscopic pageantry.
The Princess Bride, Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Jodorowsky’s Fando and Lis are all ingredients for Tarsem’s spellbinding movie (unfortunately saddled with a 15 cert for strong violence) but kids and adults sat in front of this are unlikely to forget its mystical atmosphere, achingly detailed visuals (big screen or HD viewings are mandatory), and beguiling story.
A less obvious but equally potent comparison is to Víctor Erice 's hypnotic The Spirit of the Beehive , which also touches on the hold movies have on our imaginations and was an influence on del Toro.
Tarsem borrowed the film’s bifurcated structure, and its plot generally, from the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, although the BBC’s 1986 miniseries The Singing Detective (remade in the U.S. as a feature film in 2003) makes a more familiar comparison.
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In fact, of all director Tarsem Singh's movies - this was his first - it strikes me as the one where style is most clearly used as a function of the needs of the story and the rather horrible psychological depths that story plumbs (his sophomore effort, The Fall , strikes me more as a story built more to facilitate style than the other way 'round; not that I feel for The Fall anything less than total love).
The filmmaker Tarsem (he now drops his surname, Singh, for his filmmaking credits) was last seen cross-sectioning horses, hoisting a man up by gruesome back hooks, and wandering the landscapes of a serial killer's mind in 2000's The Cell , his feature debut.
The director, who demonstrated his gift for devising stunning images in service of a plot that makes no sense whatsoever with his feature debut "The Cell" (2002) with Jennifer Lopez, devoted the next few years to this strange, self…
As in his visually sumptuous previous film, the psychedelic serial-killer pop travesty The Cell , Tarsem displays a bold and imaginative eye himself.
These days, though, like Madonna, Aaliyah and Lulu before him, he has abandoned his surname altogether â but even those who found his feature debut The Cell (2000) somewhat derivative and empty (if visually stunning) may well prefer to address Tarsem as 'maestro' or even 'guru' once they have had their eyes and mind expanded by his latest film, The Fall.
The Indian director, Tarsem Singh, is best known for his 1991 music video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," and for his previous feature, the outré 2000 creepfest "The Cell."
"Is Tamara there?" asks the young woman at the door, who in the dim light resembles the Heather Graham of Drugstore Cowboy.