Less a movie, more a mirage, a glimmer of something special amid the desert, at once breathtaking and exasperating. Once upon a time, there was a visionary young man called Tarsem Singh, who styled himself Tarsem, after Michelangelo and Rembrandt. Immersed in the exuberant visual culture of his native India, Tarsem first caught eyes as a maker of baroque pop promos: his "Losing My Religion", fashioned in collaboration with mandolin-strumming minstrels R.E.M., earned him both a Grammy and an MTV Music Video Award. The Hollywood system came calling, keen to feast on Tarsem's hypersaturated images, though his characteristically striking feature debut, 2000's The Cell, played like a very weird Jennifer Lopez video and crashed and burned at the box office. Striking out on his own, he envisioned something more ambitious yet: an 1910s-set anthology of lavishly illustrated bedtime stories that a crocked Tinseltown stuntman (Lee Pace) tells a bored young girl (Catinca Untaru) while recuperating in an L.A. hospital. 2006's The Fall was intended from the off as a grandiose and generous gesture: Tarsem's own Arabian Nights or Mahabharata. It was something like the movies with which Guillermo del Toro would emerge as one of the contemporary cinema's great fantasists, emerging around the same moment as Pan's Labyrinth; its layered storytelling anticipated what Ang Lee would later do - to Oscar-winning effect - with 2012's Life of Pi. The results would be carried shoulder-high into cinemas by David Fincher and Spike Jonze, two creatives who knew a gifted imagemaker when they saw one. Yet other forces were gathering against our hero. With its virtuosic interplay of light and dark, the film was deemed too grave for children (it opened with a 15 certificate in the UK, immediately halving its commercial chances); the Hollywood beancounters, meanwhile, felt it too expensive for a film that wasn't based on pre-existing material. No-one was ready for it, no-one knew how to sell it, and no-one had seen anything quite like it. Upon its first run, The Fall fell early and hard, and with it fell the technicolor dream of a certain kind of filmmaking.
Reissued this weekend in a restored director's cut, Singh's film invites speculation on the version of The Fall Hollywood would have made if they'd had their way. That version would likely have insisted on more familiar faces, fixed points to better reassure the viewer. Untaru is not the customary stageschool-polished automaton but an actual girl, a non-professional setting about her lines with unusual rhythms and a pronounced Slavic accent, one of several elements this circus-movie picked up as it trotted around the globe; though a semi-familiar face from theatre and TV at the time of filming, Pace, similarly, wasn't going to sell many tickets on the back of his name. Yet this pair prove central to this version's charm. His face proto-Pattinsonian in repose, Pace cuts a properly romantic figure in the bullfighter-bandit outfit he wears in the film's flashbacks, and he's a model of patience around his sometimes stuttering young co-star: had the film been the hit its makers hoped, the actor would almost certainly have been several rungs closer to the movie A-list than he presently is. More critically, the Hollywood version would also surely have demanded another pass or two at this script, to pull the story - and the story-within-the-story - into appreciably tighter shape. As The Fall meanders around the world, it assembles an unlikely squad of avengers, including Alexander the Great (Kim Uylenbroek), Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) and freed slave Otta Benga (Marcus Wesley); yet these characters appear to have been chosen less for the collective sense they make than for the opportunities they provide Eiko Ishioka (Bram Stoker's Dracula) to whip up spectacular costumes. The superhero movies that followed would be denigrated for offering too much exposition, not wanting to lose the viewer and the revenue stream they represented; The Fall would arguably have benefitted from a dash more explanation of who's in play and what's at stake, some narrative counterbalance to the film's visual magnificence.
But - boy - are those visuals magnificent. You may not mind being slightly or totally lost when finding yourself in the presence of such spectacular reference points; these images unfurl across a wide screen like banners. A tree explodes into flames (it's the Tarsem equivalent of the burning bush); shrouds take on the most primary of primary colours; a tribal gathering beats the supposedly groundbreaking Avatar to the punch by three years; there are extraordinary scenes in deserts and quarries and outside the Taj Mahal. All this beauty is liberating rather than oppressive; with each shot, Tarsem reminds his sometime Hollywood paymasters you do realise you can go anywhere with a camera, don't you? Any residual frustration stems from how the whole comes within touching distance of greatness, and what came next. The Fall is one of the most gorgeous failures of the century, and may still be closer than anything else around to the idea of cinema we retain in our heads. Yet two summers after Singh's film initially sank without trace, the colossal box-office success of Iron Man determined the new direction of Hollywood fantasy; from here on out, our family entertainments would be almost exclusively setbound and pixellated, cooked up in the safe, controllable environment of a Silicon Valley computer lab, and populated almost exclusively by familiar faces. Singh would try once again, adding 3D to his palette, with 2011's strikingly strange Immortals; but eventually even he would bend to industry norms, with takes on Snow White (2012's Mirror Mirror) and The Wizard of Oz (Prime Video's Emerald City, an early showcase for Hit Man's Adria Arjona as Dorothy Gale) where the audience knew to some degree what they were getting into. Grander designs and gestures would have to be parked for now; when Singh returned to India in 2023, somewhat chastened by experience, it was to make the largely naturalistic Dear Jassi. Impossible not to revisit The Fall and realise we lost something the minute this particular dream slipped away - but how stirring to have it back among us.
The Fall is now showing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via MUBI.
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