My first guilty "movie" pleasure come from avant garde director Tarsem Singh entitled The Fall. Tarsem's most notable claim to fame was the visually stunning yet still crappy movie, The Cell, which starred Jennifer Lopez (there's your main reason), Vince Vaughn (in a not funny role at all) and the incredible Vincent D'Onofrio who went above and beyond for this role. The Cell was an ambitious film for the director that was aimed at the mass market without much success. Its far out storyline and lack of chemistry between actors weren't enough to pull the movie from a quiet death with the masses.
The Fall is a visually stunning and yet sublime work of art, weaving photographic composition, color, special effects, good acting and an intricate storyline into a potent and evocative film that is worth watching more than once!
All of the films surreal locations and sets are actually real locations that weren't built for the movie, the majority of which were in India. Filmed in over 20 countries over four years, the director really must've racked up the miles on his credit cards! Tarsem is brilliant in his use of negative space and color to impact the viewer. The use of wideangle lenses helps to increase the size of the canvas of the film and the locations never fail to do anything less than take your breath away. In this day and age of using CGI locations, custom built sets and special effect 'other worlds', the fact that the director could use actual locations all over the world and present them in a way that made them seem almost too fantastic to exist, is uncommon and incredible. Never before outside of special effects have I ever seen such amazing locations.
The other poignant touches to the movie are its original costume design and its impeccable use of a lesser known work by Beethoven as the films' principal score. The storyline takes place partially in a Southern California sanatorium during the 1920's and partially in the imagination of the child star of the film. The storyline itself is told by an injured movie stuntman (played by Lee Pace) in the sanatorium for a severe back injury. The originality of the story telling comes from the divergence in the storytelling from what is actually being seen in the film (consider the term: Indian vs. indian, as in the older term referencing a Native American).
The main plot of the film revolves around the relationship created by the heartbroken and suicidal stuntman with a 5 year old Romanian girl who has broken her arm while picking oranges with her family in a Southern California Orange grove. Seeing the young girls mobility around the hospital, the stuntman concocts an elaborate and fantastic tale by which to manipulate the little girl into getting him a lethal dose of drugs by which to dispatch himself.
Unlike other reviewers, I will not spoil the ending or the surprises in the film except to say that this movie is a feast for the eyes and the story is light and warm like a mother embracing a child. For me, personally, I enjoyed the movies lack of cynicism that most films seem to have nowadays. I highly recommend this movie and recommend watching it more than once so as to pick up all of the subtleties you may have missed in prior viewings. As with many fantastical movies, suspension of disbelief is a must, so make sure to check your cynicisms before throwing this DVD into the player.
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