by Everett Jensen

Created on: August 06, 2008

The Fall
directed by Tarsem Singh
written by Dan Gilroy, Nico Soultanakis, and Tarsem Singh
starring Catinca Untaru, Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, Sean Gilder, Ronald France, Leo Bill, Marcus Wesley, Jeetu Verma, Julian Bleach, Robin Smith

Blending genuinely surrealistic moments with a moody, often difficult story, this film manages, despite its numerous excesses, to project its aesthetic fantasies in a decisively entertaining fashion. It's not quite art although that has nothing to do with the images being put forth. Indeed, this film is visually arresting and dynamic where so many films just aren'tthe lapses in the story just happen to bog it down a bit and occasionally grind it to a halt. The acting is naturalistic to the point of occasionally seeming improvised and the sets are as spectacular and pretentious as anything you're going to see in a cinema in this or any other year. Still, what matters here in the end is not the pretty pictures but the narrative structure itself because without it you may as well be looking at set photographs by candlelight.

Firstly, there's the issue of the adorable Romanian actress playing Alexandria in this film. How much of Catinca Untaru's mugging a person can take is going to go a long ways to determining what they will ultimately think of this film. Essentially, it is her film as her character reacts to the stories that are told to her and these reactions are the audiences's own.

There is a story within a story at play in this film and the technique here is implemented to employ present reality into a dream-like fantasy realm where nothing is permanent and any great and terrible thing is possible. In this case, Alexandria meets Roy Walker (Pace) at the hospital where both are recovering from falls. He begins to tell her stories about a group of five heroic figures who are all fighting against the same manthe terrible and fiendish Governor Odious. This part of the film is exceedingly stylized with absolutely no substance. It's certainly stunning to witness some of the backdrops that are used in the various sequences but they do nothing to serve the story which nearly collapses in the process. Still, the sets are gorgeous and nearly but not quite stand alone as pure visual cinema divorced entirely from the story which impregnates it. But, since films are holistic expressions and because this film is designed to entertain as well as inform one's sense of color, lighting, timing, and spaceit cannot lose itself in the sights and forget

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