The Fall

Although the movie, The Fall, is not as visually stunning as Hero (one of my favorites), the heightened dream set imagery adds to this delightful and eerie tale. Lee Pace, from Pushing Daisies, portrays Roy, the stuntman who is recovering in a 1920’s California hospital after a “bad” suicidal fall. He’s depressed over his lost love’s affections for the leading actor during the shooting of his cowboy movie. He meets the five year old Alexandria, played by seven year old Romanian actress Catrinca Untaro, quite by accident as her note misplaces its landing and flies into his room. Upon her retrieval of the note, he proceeds to tell her a mythical tale with the hope of her helping him complete what he failed to do in the first place.

Kids being kids, she doesn’t realize that she’s being used at first but is smarter than we all think and she convinces Roy to eventually find a happy ending to the story at last but by way of very circuitous pathways.

I enjoyed Tarsem, the director’s ability to show the loss of childhood innocence that Alexandria witnesses repeatedly and the strength she finds to endure. Her attitude is pretty infectious with the hospital staff, Roy and even with his made up characters as well as the audience.

There were many touching moments as there were surreal, like her “doll-like” video operation and when the Mystic enters the scene from a tree and his people sing “Deep Forest” type chants to revive his spirit and set the direction for the next course of action. (Deep Forest is some of my early painting music. Tarsem directed their video as well as REM’s “Losing My Religion,” which to me is like a Caravaggio painting in motion.)

There are also clever allusions to the film’s copyright under Googly Films, when Alexandria recites a phrase to help her scare her demons away, “Googly, googly go away!” Finally there are uplifting moments of humor when Alexandria relates all of Roy’s story characters to people she knows, including “The Indian,” who as he tells it should be a Native American Indian “no longer able to look at another squaw” but she pictures him as from India. Like the ending in The Wizard of Oz, we later learn why. I guess dreams sometimes do mimic real life…or is it the other way around?

This picture clip from the movie reminds me of an Escher etching. We saw his original work at the Escher Museum in the Hague when we took a family trip in 2006. Mesmerizing with complex and brilliant compositions.