I was in in a city northeast of Mumbai 15 years ago. The city was hot and crowded, but on top of a hill, I wandered into a palace cemetery with the usual collection of ruined mausoleums. There were few people there in the relative cool, and the quiet was soothed further by a man playing a stringed instrument. Sitting beside a small mausoleum, the musician told me that the deceased had left a bequest that would pay for a musician to play at this tomb……forever. I was touched by what must have been the deceased’s love for art, that he would devote the proceeds of a lifetime’s work to something as ephemeral as music, and that his love of art had reached out beyond his own death to give me that little pleasure on that afternoon.
I remembered this experience after I watched Tarsem Singh’s The Fall. There’s the obvious Indian connection, but this film is also one man’s passion for art – cinema, in this case -- that is so great he put a big part of his own fortune into this single work. And you can tell The Fall is the singular vision of an individual: There is little of Hollywood film language here, and the images simply overpower the narrative. These images are ravishing, from Pacific atolls to Himalayan lakes and Indian Palaces with Balinese kecak performance. The glory of the film is its images, and The Fall celebrates them throughout. It reminds me of the 1937 Snow White, a movie that is so driven by the love of the images that its animation can produce that the narrative becomes a thin excuse to go from one wonderful set of visuals to another. The same is true here.
That’s not to say that The Fall lacks typical characters or that the characters lack a narrative arc. Roy deals with his depression throughout the narrative frame of the hospital, and he and Alexandria build a relationship that is important to both of them in that context, too. And the film has some thematic content as it plays with the relationship between the narrative frame and the events in Roy’s story – actors have different roles in the frame and the story, like the actors do in The Wizard of Oz, and characters and events in the frame affect the narrative of the story. In fact, the characters and actions of the story become the language that Roy and Alexandria eventually use to talk to each other. And the characters here are also moving. You especially feel sympathy for Alexandria, through whose perspective we see the events of the movie. She experiences drama that is more intense than most children experience, and her life is anything but simple. Language is a barrier for her, her migrant-worker parents face discrimination, and she herself will return to work in the orchards where she’s previously fallen and broken her arm. Cinema, story-telling, will provide her with much of the little pleasure she will have.
Yet despite these compelling cinematic elements, The Fall keeps returning to its colorful, striking images. A spectacular red tent on wheels is dragged through an alpine desert by hundreds of slaves; a giant square of white fabric with a large red blotch stands out against a bright background, creating an image like a Rothko on a wall; and a captive runs through a cinematic maze constructed out of shots from an ancient observatory. These are the parts of The Fall that resonate after the film ends.
It’s easy to see how someone could think of this film as a vanity project. Singh is a wealthy man, and he comes from a music video background that makes him more skilled at visuals than at directing actors or creating compelling stories. But The Fall is an instance of beauty created out of one man’s love of art. It comes from the same impulse as the music that is still being played in that Indian cemetery thanks to the bequest of an art lover.
