The Fall (2008)

Having grown up in a video shop and having seen the best and worst in movies and now also being in my 40s,, rarely something turns up that makes me go wow. This is one of those wow moments.Stunning, i mean stunning visuals, great acting and a fantastic storyline. Put the kids to bed, feet up and immerse yourself in this movie. Brilliant.

Formulaic, glitzy nonsense suitable for the under 12 market.

This film is art. It's an ode to storytelling and to film making, doing justice to both forms by intertwining them seamlessly. The acting is outstanding, as is the plot.

Tarsem Singh's The Fall is mastery of photography, color, scenery, editing, and imagination the likes of which you have never seen, and most likely will not see again after the fact. It is a story told by a broken stuntman of American silent films, as envisioned by a nine-year-old Romanian girl who shares the same hospital. The result is, and I do not hand this designation out like candy these days, unique.The stuntman is Roy Walker (Lee Pace) and in addition to his inability to work due to crippling himself during a dangerous bridge-jumping stunt (the "fall" of the title), he has lost his girlfriend and is more or less prepared to die. However, he makes the acquaintance of an orphaned patient named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), and tells her a brief story of Alexander the Great, whom her name reminds him of. Should she return the next day, he says he will tell another story.That story is of The Masked Bandit and his allies, who venture through just about every picturesque and strange-looking location on Planet Earth to find the evil Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone), who has wronged them all in some way. Some of them are simply stereotypical products of far-off lands, like Luigi (Robin Smith), an Italian with explosives to spare, and a character known simply as The Indian (Jeetu Verma). Others are historical figures, such as liberated slave Ota Benga (Marcus Wesley) and Charles Darwin (Leo Bill), complete with a pet monkey who assists him (and is named Wallce, after the scientist whom Darwin is rumored to have stolen ideas from). Last but not least is The Mystic (Julian Bleach), who exits a burning tree on an otherwise empty shorline to give our heroes bewildering clues.You're out of luck if you try to think too much about logic and logistics in this story. I could not tell you how our heroes summon elephants to free them from a small island or how to make sense of the montage where the heroes jump from Paris to Spain to India to Tibet to wherever else. I'm not supposed to. Besides, you will find that the characters ask similar questions.As the girl imagines the tale, eventually including herself as a character, we notice parallels between the fairy tale and the world she lives in, as well as her comprehension of the words used. "The Indian" is envisioned as the Indian man who works in the garden and whose "wigwam", as Roy calls it, is an oriental palace. The beautiful Sister Evelyn, meanwhile, manifests in the form of a similarly named nurse at the hospital, played by Justine Waddell; Luigi is a one-legged Hollywood actor who visits Roy, and the historical figures don't much resemble their actual real-life counterparts. There's more but you get the idea.The Fall was shot on location in 28 countries, IMDb tells me, over a period of four years, and virtually none of what we see is via the use of computer-generated effects or green-screen backgrounds. Every piece of unthinkable scenery, all the remarkable structures (including the vast labyrinth of stairways and the ancient village where some of the buildings are painted blue), every masterful costume; whether it was hand-made for the film or a strange but stunning place on our home planet, what we see is completely real. 100% of it, insists Tarsem.The only thing I suspect is a digital effect (unless it is stop-motion, which is also utilized in a brilliantly animated nightmare sequence that really stands out) is the moving scarification tattoo that moves across The Mystic's skin in one scene. I don't know how else it could have been done. There are VFX artists listed in the credits so at the very least, someone deserves praise for making the digital effects completely unnoticeable (give or take a moving tattoo).The imagery is complemented perfectly by Krishna Levy's music and Colin Watkinson's impeccable camera work, as well as certain editing tricks I am yet to fathom. Of the directing and acting I cannot say enough. The screenplay, I learn, is based in part on a 1981 Bulgarian film called Yo Ho Ho; I assume it's the part with The Masked Bandit.At the heart of it all is a warm and believable chemistry between Lee Pace and Catinca Untaru, the latter of whom went through production unaware that Pace wasn't crippled in real life as well (how fitting). In some ways, Roy is inadvertently cruel to Alexandria, taking advantage of her childlike innocence and curiosity to make her bring him morphine. However, the two found each other at the right time, and I hope this isn't too much of a spoiler, but this fairy tale ends on a brighter note.No matter. The journey there is a once-in-a-lifetime feast for the eyes and an imaginative exercise in using the medium to its fullest - even as the real star of the show is something as close to reality as our own pretty little world. It is not escapism from reality so much as it inspires you to explore the more beautiful parts of it. If there's anything bad about the movie it's the implication that Buster Keaton did not perform his own stunts.