All for Show

Tarsem Singh's striking visuals jump off the screen, but his stories Fall flat.

by Shaun Brady

EMERGENCY ROAM: In the hospital, a stuntman (Lee Pace, left) tells a girl (Catinca Untaru) stories in which they're bandits in a mystical kingdom. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In the hands of a director like Guillermo del Toro, fairy tales can take on a depth of meaning, not only paralleling harsh realities, but gilding them with the richness of myth. In the hands of Tarsem Singh (who goes by just "Tarsem"), however, such tales are merely dressed up like Vogue models and trotted out on an overdesigned catwalk.

Years in the making and more than a decade in conception, The Fall is a labor of superficial love that most resembles Pan's Labyrinth as interpreted by Cirque du Soleil on the Vegas strip. Much of it is undeniably striking, but better suited for production stills than narrative; it's a paean to the imagination that instead offers stifling indulgence to the senses.

Given that they're basically left to their own devices while their director worries about the exacting relationship of colors, the cast is fine. Lee Pace is a silent-era movie stuntman confined to a hospital after being injured in a stunt foolishly undertaken to impress his former girlfriend, recently run off with the film's leading man. While incapacitated, he befriends Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a young girl recovering from a fall while picking oranges, a hint of her immigrant family's life of hard labor.

Suicidal as a result of his lost love, Pace manipulates the girl into stealing pills for him, bringing her back each day with an improvised story about a gang of vengeful, heroic bandits in a mystical kingdom ruled by an evil overlord. That story is where Tarsem pours his exaggerated visual prowess, creating a magic kingdom peopled by figures from the hospital, Wizard of Oz-style. The saga bears the influence of The Princess Bride's pomo take on fairy tales, though in texture it seems more like 300's makeover of Greek mythology.

One of the strengths of the director's conception is that the tale as related visually is a commingling of storyteller and audience, its final form a blend of what is told and what is heard. As eventually revealed, the story itself is merely a recap of the Western Pace had been making at the time of his injury, combined with personal bio and cynicism. But the images spring from Alexandria's imagination, leading to a few contradictions; Pace's description of one of his heroes as an Indian, complete with references to a squaw, are depicted as a turbaned man more in line with what the Romanian-born girl's conception of "Indian" would be (obviously not an incidental point to the Indian-born director).

Where Tarsem betrays that concept, though, is in his fetish for Dali-meets-Disney visuals. The idea that these pictures spring from the mind of an Eastern European child recently arrived in 1915 California rather than a middle-aged music video director is simply unbelievable, and undermines any relation between the real and imagined stories. The Fall is adapted from an obscure 1981 Bulgarian film, Yo Ho Ho, which apparently used a more simplistic (and therefore more appropriate) pirate yarn in place of Tarsem's weave of mythology, fairy tale, children's adventure novel and Charles Darwin.

Untaru's presence in the framing story is the one whiff of naturalism in this otherwise claustrophobically artificial piece. The director apparently gave her free rein to improvise and therefore shape the story, and she stumbles, stammers and rambles — often incomprehensibly — in a recognizably childlike manner. It's a performance bordering on the cloying, which might feel too sickly sweet in a more naturalistic setting. But here, her every stutter and mumble is like opening a window, letting a draft into a shuttered attic.

Based on available plot synopses of the original, the emotional components of this script (co-written by Tarsem, fellow video vet Nico Soultanakis and Dan Gilroy) all have their analogues in Yo Ho Ho: the ploys of the suicidal actor, the dour love story, even the deteriorating storyteller cruelly picking off his characters one by one to the protests of his young audience. As with his mash-up of Silence of the Lambs and hoary dream sequence imagery in The Cell, Tarsem here seems most interested in dressing up recycled plot elements in pretty pictures, draining life from his sources in favor of precisely controlled design. It's an approach better suited to a wax museum than a film set.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

THE FALL

Directed by Tarsem Singh

A Roadside Attractions release