More on 'The Fall'
I saw The Fall during the DC International Film Festival in April and I loved it. It opens in U.S. theaters today, and tomorrow the director is going to be appearing at both Landmark locations in the DC area (7 pm in Bethesda and 10 pm at E Street). I AM SO THERE. One of my regrets is that Tarsem Singh was not available for the festival showing - I would have LOVED to hear him talk about how he made this eye-popping extravaganza of a film. I'm really looking forward to hearing him speak tomorrow. *goes to buy tickets*
'The Fall,' A Plunge Into A Deep Well Of Imagining
By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 30, 2008; C01
Think of "The Fall" as a film snob's "Indiana Jones." A rapturous valentine to cinema's roots, this visually dazzling evocation of matinee heroes and mythmaking fancy by turns plays with Hollywood's most cherished conventions and worships art for art's sake. It's a weird and often wonderful journey over the rainbow, featuring the screen's most captivating Dorothy since Judy Garland.
In this case, the young adventuress in question is named Alexandria, played in an enthralling debut by Romanian actress Catinca Untaru, who was 7 years old when this movie was filmed. In a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s, Alexandria is recovering from a broken arm suffered while picking fruit with her immigrant family; while visiting another ward she befriends a stuntman named Roy (Lee Pace), who tried to commit suicide over a broken heart. He begins to tell her a story about five epic heroes engaged in various acts of derring-do, romance and revenge, a story she visualizes by way of her own nascent understanding of the life and language around her.
One of the leitmotifs of "The Fall," which was written and directed by Tarsem Singh (who goes by his first name only), is that Alexandria has never seen a picture show, so she visualizes Roy's references to early movie action heroes by way of her own imaginative references: the people with whom she works the orange groves, or the characters on her cherished cigar box. When Roy describes one character as an "Indian," he means a Native American, but she makes him a man from India.
The misunderstandings result in ruptures between Roy's narration and Alexandria's elaborate reimaginings that are often amusing but always stunning, as the story becomes more elaborate. Even the most offhand American idiom -- the phrase "greener pastures," for example -- conjures in Alexandria lush visions of astonishing beauty.
Tarsem ("The Cell"), known for his lavish visual sense, spares nothing in bringing both Alexandria's experience and consciousness to life in "The Fall," which was filmed in dozens of locations in several countries. Terribly cerebral, meticulously staged and extravagantly costumed, the film pays homage to the foundational principles of moviemaking, from Alexandria's shadow play on a hospital wall to an accidental camera obscura created by sunlight through a keyhole.
And it traffics in stunning and indelible images, from Alexandria's idea of Charles Darwin dressed in what looks like a fabulous Vivienne Westwood coat (eat your heart out, Carrie Bradshaw), to a city of buildings painted entirely in blue, to a priest's face that transforms into a desert rock formation. Fans of the ecstatic visions of Guillermo del Toro will detect a kindred spirit in Tarsem, who got his start making densely layered, visually striking music videos for R.E.M. and Deep Forest.
As Roy's tale gets darker, with his heroes giving up and giving in to humiliation, Alexandria fights hard for the happy ending she thinks they both deserve, and "The Fall" threatens to career off the rails. But even working within the indulgent excesses and mannerisms of Tarsem's hermetic style, Untaru brings her courageous character to life with amazing humor and self-possession.
Filmgoers with an aversion to seeing a child in danger should be warned that at one point she endures a painful and terrifying mishap, but rest assured that where endings are concerned, Tarsem stands firmly with his plucky heroine.
The perfect foil for Untaru's fearless little explorer, Pace makes the most of an inert but dangerously manipulative character, imbuing him with sympathetic tenderness even at the depths of his self-pity. And he gets to flash the quiet deadpan wit that makes him such an appealing leading man on the TV series "Pushing Daisies" in "The Fall's" most outlandish fantasy sequences.
For a movie about someone who's never seen a movie, "The Fall" proves to be a passionate love letter to the cinematic art form -- one that changed the face of America (a newspaper Alexandria uses to fashion a mask contains a headline about the flooding of a California valley) and that to this day transmits the idea of America, to its own citizens and to the world. That idea, of course, isn't always salutary, but while sending up the cultural caricatures cinema went on to create, Tarsem also shows deep affection for a medium of virtually unbounded imaginative expression.
With this by turns mordant and rhapsodic portrait of the American exotics who created the Hollywood film industry, he's added a surreal if ultimately confounding chapter to a volume defined by such early California films as "Chinatown" and "There Will Be Blood." And he's created a mesmerizing tone poem to cinema as a medium of magic and miracles, stories and lies.
The Fall (117 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for violent images.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/29/AR2008052903982.html
In other news, I went to Teaism with a colleague today, ordered a tuna bento, sweet green tea & salty oat cookies, and we sat outside in the sunshine on the Navy Memorial (right where Australia should be but isn't) and it was DIVINE. I'm in such a good mood now! *______*