May 9th, 2008

Navigating the Nightmare in Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall”

By Simon Abrams

Tarsem Singh’s name may not be familiar but that’s because his last film was 2001’s The Cell. Even before then he was working on his dream project, The Fall, without the aid of studio backing or professional stars (save for the then little-known Lee Pace). Apparently, working with J.Lo was hell. But just because The Fall doesn’t have any big guns behind it doesn’t mean that Singh’s film is without its big ideas and bigger visuals. The Fall builds on the concept of Zako Heskija’s Yo Ho Ho (1981), the story of a sick man using Arabian Nights-like storytelling to entice a child into assisting his suicide. Where The Cell was a hackneyed story with dense, fantastic dream sequences, The Fall is a fully developed nightmare, one where the narrative framework can’t simply be tossed aside for the dream to entrance the viewer.

While clearly intelligent, Singh’s style in The Cell featured a cacophony of influences thrown into a blender and juxtaposed with a bewitching, impenetrable logic. The dream world of serial killer Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio in an Anton Chigurhesque wig) provided the setting for an arcane, depraved museum complete with glass cages, walking victims of taxidermy, bleached corpses and Biblical tortures. Understanding what Singh was confronting you with was impossible because logic in this world was an aesthetic one rather than the narrative kind that limply carries the film from one dream sequence to the next. Watching the dream sequences is like entering the mind of a monster arranged by an artist with a sense of style every bit as schizophrenic as his subject’s.

Singh’s follow-up features an equally twisted logic where the body is the mind’s guide. After jumping from an elevated set of train tracks on horseback, stuntman Roy Walker (Pace) recuperates slowly in an idyllic turn-of-the-century L.A. hospital. The most crushing blow comes for Walker before the fall: his girlfriend loves Sinclair (Daniel Caltagirone), the leading man in Walker’s latest picture. Thanks to Alexandria (Catinca Untaru in a very memorable debut performance), Walker leaves behind his immediate wounds and becomes involved in telling the story of five bandits that all have their hearts set on revenge. There’s the ex-slave turned tribal warrior (Marcus Wesley), the Indian (Jeetu Verma), the Italian dynamite expert (Robin Smith), Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) and the Black Bandit (Emil Hostina). Together, they each vow to kill the evil Governor Odious (Caltagirone), a foil for the loathsome lothario that stole Walker’s lover away.

As the story goes on, the bond between Alexandria and Roy grows to the point where his thoughts of suicide resurface in their story. Alexandria may be listening, but she’s the one visualizing the characters. The limitless dreams, fears, visual vocabulary and preoccupations of a child with the guidance of a sick guide breed strange portents, indeed. The images within the story/dream entice and frighten the viewer because of Alexandria’s preoccupations with a world where medicine is just another man-made labyrinth. There is no logic to it for someone that sees only fragments, making the adult world ruled by nothing more than systematic faith in haphazard ritual. “Why does that old man keep his teeth in that glass at night,” Alexandria pesters Roy, foreshadowing her stumbling upon glass jars that contain preserved fetuses in a grotesque display of nonsensical order. She meets Roy because of a misplaced note and because he teases her that she wrote nothing but gibberish, she uses their story to both romanticize and decode the world into something more than what Nurse Evelyn (Justine Waddell) calls “funny talk.” Carefree as she may seem, the chandelier made of human body parts in the story is as much her creation as it is Roy’s.

Roy’s world is no less complicated. Love has let him down and he retreats into a fairy tale where the face betrays the heart. As the masked Bandit, he attempts to peel back the veil of the women that haunt him—the enticing girlfriend, the comforting Evelyn and the unexpected Alexandria. “What a mystery, this world,” the Bandit laments. “One day you love them, the next day you want to kill them a thousand times over.” He lives and dies by his ability to tease out the truth behind their respective masks and without a map to guide him through foreign territory swarming with Odious’ guards, he’s more than a little lost.

Character motivations may make the dream in the film, but Singh is the real magician. His last frantic blast of hallucinatory visuals almost causes the story’s logic to implode. When Roy finds he can’t kill himself, the bandits start to die one-by-one in their final bid to kill Odious. The nightmarish images swirling about the story begin to close in, creating a dizzying cascade of unexplainable images that ditch linearity like a derailed train from its tracks. Here Singh has finally embraced what made both of his films so inviting and also so confounding. While they appear to be plots that functionally employ set pieces, they’re dreams that thinks they’re stories. Singh’s greatest asset is his ability to tease out convoluted ornamental details. Once he puts the horse before the rider, there’s no stopping him.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Arts, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.