by Timothy Taylor

Created on: February 14, 2011

Surreal is probably the most fitting term for Tarsem Singh's fantasy film “The Fall”. Lush and colorful, the film is reminiscent visually of a surrealist painting or the film “The Cell” without being quite so dark.

The story begins with a black and white montage of an accident near a bridge, though exactly what has happened is hard to determine. We are then introduced to Alexandria, an immigrant girl recovering from a broken arm in a Los Angeles hospital. It is sometime around 1920, but before the age of flappers and shortening hem lines. Alexandria is inquisitive and friendly, exploring the hospital and befriending everyone she meets. By chance one day she meets Roy, a Hollywood stuntman who was injured performing a stunt and is now paralyzed. Roy tells Alexandria she was named for Alexander the Great and tries to tell her a story about him which she does not like. He asks her to return the next day and he will tell her a better story.

Roy and Alexandria strike up a friendship and he spins an adventure story of five warriors on a quest to kill the man who has wronged them all. The film shifts from the real world to Alexandria's imagination where the story comes to life through her child-like eyes. The lines begin to blur as Alexandria imagines the story with people and items from her life. The henchmen that pursue the five look like the hospital's x-ray technician in his lead mask and apron, which frightened Alexandria earlier in the film. Roy tells her of a Native American man in the story, using the term Indian, and Alexandria imagines him as the man from India who worked with her family in an orange grove.

It soon becomes clear that Roy is unhappy, and his career is over now that he is paralyzed, his girlfriend breaks up with him and he asks Alexandria to get morphine for him from the hospital's supply room. He is trying to commit suicide and is using the story to get Alexandria to do what he wants.

Alexandria is a wide eyed intelligent child, with a slightly mischievous side and this provides a great deal of humor in the midst of an otherwise strange film. Roy is both himself in the real world and the main hero of the story, where he seems to be the best version of himself. Even in his darkest moments we are able to see what he is capable of through his counterpart in the story. The story scenes themselves are lush and beautiful, with a grand epic scale and exotic locations from around the world. Everything feels as though it has

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