So a while back, Molly recommended The Fall. I set out to see it, and did, but haven’t been able to quite explain what my feelings are on the film. As of a few days ago, I think I finally figured out why, and it’s weirdly connected with the most recent Dirty Projectors album. (At least in a metaphorical way.)
Tarsem Singh’s The Fall is a difficult film to summarize, in part because its setup is so simple: in the early days of Hollywood, a paralyzed stuntman tells a story of adventure to a young girl. There are two parallel storylines: one being the story of these two and the other patients and staff of a hospital, the other being the stuntman’s story, which ends up being filtered through his own revisions and through the imagination of his audience. (Its roots are in an early-80s film called Yo Ho Ho, from which it seems to borrow its framing story and structure; a lengthy piece on said film can be seen here.)
The problem in describing The Fall, then, is that it doesn’t entirely fit into pre-existing categories. The adventure element, though visually stunning, feels less compelling on its own and more as a reflection of its teller’s agonies. And while a cursory description might seem similar to The Princess Bride or The Neverending Story, I never felt much of a connection with the characters of the story within the story — nor do I think I was meant to. (Weirdly, the only film I can think of to even remotely compare it with of recent vintage might be Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — and that is a stretch, given that the two share little in common except a hospital setting and an abundance of subjectivity.)
The invocation of the Dirty Projectors comes into play here: last year, said band released Rise Above, in which the group attempted to cover Black Flag’s Damaged based entirely on the memories of David Longstreth. It was a constantly shifting, deeply compelling album, but it also by its very existence creates its own subsection of music. (Unless, of course, other bands decide to start following suit, but I suspect that the “covers based on fading memories” concept is subject to the law of diminishing returns.) The Fall is similar, and the at times hallucinatory imagery Singh creates onscreen is less there to inspire a sense of wonder as it is to reflect both a child’s imagination and a jaded, depressive adult’s bottomless despair. The film creates its own genre, its own metric; aside from a brief coda at the end, about the only thing it can be compared with is itself. It’s hard to argue with Roger Ebert’s assertion that “[t]here will never be another like it”.
Incidentally, in that review, Ebert bestows upon the film four stars and urges his readership to see it. For the record, I’d definitely second that.
(And as a quick postscript, I’d also have to say that, amazing visuals or not, the two leads in The Fall are both terrific, and help to keep this film rooted in the absolutely human. And there’s one sequence late in the film that, without giving anything away, may be the best onscreen evocation of dream logic I’ve ever seen.)
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