The Fall. 2006. USA. Directed by Tarsem Singh Dhandwar. Screenplay by Dan Gilroy, Nico Soultanakis, Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, based on the film Yo Ho Ho by Zako Heskija. With Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru, Justine Waddell. Costume design by Eiko Ishioka. DCP. 117 min.
In a Los Angeles hospital in 1915, Roy Walker—a stuntman paralyzed from a fall during a film shoot—befriends Alexandria, a five-year-old immigrant girl recovering from a broken collarbone. Devastated by his injury and a failed romance, Roy begins spinning an elaborate fantasy adventure for the child, his tale of masked bandits and evil governors growing more fantastical with each telling. But his storytelling has a dark purpose: to manipulate Alexandria into stealing morphine so he can end his life. Tarsem’s self-financed passion project—shot over four years in 24 countries by piggybacking on his commercial assignments—rejects the digital aesthetics dominating 2000s cinema in favor of unmediated visual astonishment. Eiko Ishioka’s costume designs become integral to the film’s nested reality, where hospital patients transform into swashbuckling heroes through the alchemy of a child’s imagination. The director’s commitment to practical locations and in-camera effects yields images of startling beauty: an elephant swimming overhead, an Escher-like palace of interlocking staircases, villages painted in gradations of indigo. The Fall is a meditation on storytelling as both salvation and weapon, and on the seductive, dangerous power of cinema itself.