Tarsem Singh’s Personal Epic
Since The Fall is a remake of a Bulgarian film (1981’s Yo ho ho), question may arise over Singh’s personal attachment to the film. I have not seen the original, but glossing over old synopses and information makes me believe he took the whole structure of the story and used it in his remake. Some may notch down the new version. Many fans on the world cinema front still look down on Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction because they see how much it borrowed from Chinese genre cinema in its stories. Tarantino never put an adaptation label on these two films, but some believe he should have. I’m not so sure. Even if Tarantino borrowed entire story structures, there is no way he could have borrowed the extent of his writing for dialogue. That is what makes those two films noteworthy to his fans and in Tarsem Singh’s case, even though he does have an adaptation label, it’s likely the original did not encompass the extent of Tarsem’s visionary spectacle. In this sense, I call The Fall a re-imagination work.
As a cinematography-based filmmaker out of the Nicolas Roeg mold, Tarsem Singh began in music videos in the 90s and followed up with mainstream commercials and experimental videos. In the small sampling, a mold of style became apparent. When he transitioned into feature filmmaking with The Cell in 2000, a psychological philosophy exploded along with his with style. Instead of tinge generic stories with a layer of stylistic maneuvers to obscure normalcy, Singh made his explosion of slow-motion and wild visuals speak for a psychological story of a cyber investigation into the mind of a comatose murderer. Without explaining plot details which makes that scenario possible, a police officer and psychologist roamed through the memory of his past to get him to come forward with information on the whereabouts of a victim who was still alive but missing. The investigation burrowed into every mold of psychological framework. No real story outlined his history. All of Tarsem Singh’s visuals were the illustration. Instead of be just a cinematographer, Singh pedigreed his style by making it production based as well. The combination allowed The Cell to be a more rounded visual film.
What Singh did in The Cell reminds me of what Salvador Dali did for surrealism painting in the 1930s. Instead of continue to nibble at the fray of stylistic maneuvers in his paintings (of which Picasso was the master), he patterned his paintings to have a full psychological application be ready to be applied and used for interpretation. Since his paintings were skewing known things in our world (like time in a dream), people outside art were able to comment on his work extended beyond painting. Painting wants to be based in modes of style relevant to painting while it seemed like Dali was taking his film influences (working with Luis Bunuel) and adding elements of story to his paintings. It got Sigmund Freud to make his famous comments about the psychology in Dali’s work. For Singh, the production option allows him to dig deeper into the story and make the viewer unable to just comment on technique. It’s problematic since every stylistic filmmaker wants to line up their work against traditional models. The Cell has a thriller model, but it felt like Tarsem Singh would abandon genre models as soon as he could. I’m glad he didn’t disappoint with his follow-up.
In The Fall, an unlikely friendship begins between two patients at an early 1900s hospital in Los Angeles. One is a little girl who suffers from a broken arm and the other is an out of work stunt actor who is paralyzed from his waist down after an accident on the set of a movie. They begin friendly companionship when the stunt actor, Roy, tells the little girl, Alexandria, an epic story. Since the story is imagination based, both play with logic and events of the story as it goes along. For Alexandria, it provides her a chance to portal to a world beyond her hospital existence. She imagines worlds over Roy’s words and immediately, Singh obliges with fabled locations to drape the setting of the characters. They are a crew of outcasts who seek revenge of a local tyrant that did each of them wrong at some point. The coalition becomes a legion of bandits and they set to traverse through mystical elements and locations to find their tormentor and lay waste to his kingdom. Every new setting has a new local tradition which provides certain challenges. Roy flavors his story by adapting things he sees around his hospital bed as means to fill in small blanks with the story whenever he comes up to a conclusion or scenario that needs further explanation to Alexandria.
The affair of the story isn’t so whimsical. It’s discovered that he is using Alexandria to get him morphine pills. The more she is pulled into the story, the more he can inch favors out of her if she wants him to continue with it. He even uses her feelings for him by saying the pills will help him to sleep when in reality he is looking to kill himself. The disgruntlement lies over his paralysis and how it has got his girlfriend to leave him. Alexandria doesn’t know all the back story right away, but she sees his feeling of uselessness and feels responsible for his livelihood so she takes the risks to get the pills. The suicide isn’t an immediate success so the story continues on and Roy starts to put himself into the story and re-tell in fable what he feels he is losing with his girlfriend. The fable sees the lead bandit steal a girl away from the tyrant he hates. At first, it feels romantic, but soon she betrays him and disgruntles his well being. Roy is casting sail on the story so he’s starting to tip every subplot to have a bad ending because it reflects his mood. Alexandria tries to avert the bad tidings by inserting herself into the story as well, but she can only do so much.
Tarsem Singh discovers geographical wizardry with how he creates the fabled world around the characters. Instead of concoct new settings through special effects, he uses 41 real locations in 28 different countries to shoot the entire film. The fable sequences are extensive, but since the characters are traveling by foot, it feels like they only really travel to half a dozen places. Singh cuts off the chance for the audience to relax into one environment by constantly changing the lens of where the characters are. In the matter of one scene, the constant fluctuation of the camera movements will juxtapose how the film shows the characters. Sometimes the different angles will be just different angles, but sometimes the film will show new temperament in the characters or the scenes by changing location and making the audience believe the location didn’t change; only the substantive emotions. However, it is this constant feeling of change in environment that does become the normal feeling. As different locales from different continents are merged together, the audience is asked to make the exotic hinges of the story feel normal.
Like most style based filmmakers, the patterns of the story is dominated by patterns of camera movement which do not seem positioned to support the action of the story in traditional ways. Most times a style will supplant itself behind a story so it isn’t realized by an audience. Singh is like other author oriented filmmakers by having constant moving patterns for his camera. During a scene, the camera will often pan around a environment to show its beauty. It marginalizes the characters. Traditional films introduce new scenes with pan shots and crane shots to get an audience acquainted with location before the characters talk. Afterward, the camera movement mellows to a standstill for the purpose of the characters. The Fall makes you feel the sliding movement of the camera work before anything else. If an interpretation of what it means, the constant movement can be the time line feeling of how everything is up in the air when it comes to narrated stories being relayed by visualization. As Roy is constantly looking for inspiration around him to connect the dots of the story, the film is reflecting his mindset by tilting the environment of the scenes to constantly change and reflect in new lights.
Lights can refer to character reflections, but it also refers to tonal colorization in the film. A film’s DP will temper the feeling of the story early on with how they approach basic scenes and set ups. Since the film is set in sunny Los Angeles, lots of light mixed with earth colors are spread through out the film. Dark colors are introduced sparingly to offset certain things in a scene, but one thing the film does beautifully is change the light fixture of how people experience light when outside. Early in the film, Roy asks Alexandria to close her eyes and rub her eyes to be able to disorient her vision so she can see what feels looks like stars. Since the entire story is based on personal projection, Roy is telling the story like he is experiencing it. One of the things people do feel during sunny days is how light changes in the air and how the eyes adjust to different shades of light. While the moment seems small, projecting our vision to a new degree of light does momentarily make a person feel like they are somewhere else. The Fall does not simplify this feeling with a change here and there. It constantly mobilizes the potential for new experiential moments by diagnosing the placement of first-person perspective.
The Cell was a good beginning for Tarsem Singh and considering his next project, Immortals, Singh may be returning to Hollywood ventures. It depends on how he does it, but the film is studio produced and has a lot of money involved. Whatever its qualities may be, people will not expect what Singh delivers here in The Fall. It takes the psychological potential of his first film and expands it to a full personal experience of a romantic story on a livid stylistic level. I have found memories of what the likes of Nicolas Roeg and others have done for filmmakers who saw through films like they were cinematographers making due with what a director has to do, but I’m glad Singh takes the previous examples for influence and finds a new degree to add to it. Since his career is still young, it may be a blip on the map since I feel he can do more. The quality feeling about The Fall is that I experienced the film through many levels of emotion and experience while being excited on all levels of critical thinking. A wonderful movie.
Film Splatter 