VIEW: Exclusive photos from The Fall
READ MORE: Tarsem Singh and Lee Pace Q&A

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 5/8/08)

It's a tough business, being a would-be visionary filmmaker. Tarsem Singh, a prodigiously successful commercial and music video director with an undeniable eye, an eccentric flair, and great taste in prior visionary filmmakers (his short works contain oblique references to masters such as Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky), is so uncompromising when it comes to making feature-length films that he's only completed two in his nearly 20-year career. His first was 2000's The Cell, an imperfectly realized serial killer quasi-fantasia in which the director cleverly applied several tropes from contemporary art to illustrate the mental state of a vicious murderer. The Fall, completed in 2006 but not released until now, seems a project somewhat closer to his heart. Well, I suppose it would have to be, since I understand it was largely financed by Singh himself. Loosely adapted from a 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, The Fall is a movie whose every frame pulsates with the desire to be a transportive, transcendent work of cinema. And each one of said frames is full of visual bedazzlement and wonder. So full that one is loathe to sum up with the phrase "Close, but no cigar." But there is something, finally, kind of pushy about the film's desire to be a masterpiece.

The picture's setup is simplicity itself: Roy Walker, a silent cinema stuntman (Pace) paralyzed in a fall on the job, stews in self-pitying bitterness in a hospital. But he charms Alexandria (Untaru) a little girl who's a fellow patient (all she has is a broken arm), and begins telling her a fantasy story with characters based on other patients. He's a male Scheherezade, and the reward he requests is in the form of morphine tablets the girl is able to pilfer from the hospital's medicine supply; it's with these pills that he plans to end his own life.

While the setup may be simple, the story Roy tells is not; it grows increasingly more complex, convoluted, and far fetched as he tells it, with abrupt changes in mood, setting and character. And Tarsem visualizes all these changes with incredible vigor, imagination, and geographical acuity. The film was shot in South Africa, Argentina, China, Chile, Italy, the Czech Republic, Spain, the Maldives, Egypt, Indonesia, Brazil, Fiji, Namibia, Turkey, Romania and Jodhpur in Rajasthan, India, which is also known as the Blue City for reasons the movie reveals as obvious. The place looks like Heaven as imagined by Yves Klein.

The Fall works like crazy as a multi-leveled, smart, jaw-droppingly beautiful, big-hearted piece of entertainment; I couldn't find a single inaccessible thing about it, which makes me despair that it found so long to get a theatrical release. Still, I can't quite bring myself to call it visionary. But it'll more than do until the genuinely visionary comes along, as that doesn't happen too often, especially these days.

— Glenn Kenny