Review: The Fall

RECOMMENDED

Tarsem Singh’s voluptuous second feature (after the hermetic “The Cell”) was made around the world, with scenes grabbed in exotic locales while he made mega-budget commercials. A narrative within a narrative, “The Fall,” the framing story, set in a California hospital in the 1920s, finds a bed-bound stuntman (Lee Pace) telling fantastical stories to a young emigrant girl (round-faced Romanian Catinca Untaru). The child’s non-acting is appealing; Pace’s bad acting is not. But the flights of fancy include imagery of rare beauty, at once concrete and lyrical. (Note the perspective on a swimming elephant, from just beneath its gently kicking legs against the blue-on-blue surface of water lit by sky.) “The Fall,” finished in 2006, is only now finding a release with a presentation credit from his commercial-making colleagues Spike Jonze and David Fincher, but the exuberant extravagance of Tarsem’s tableaux is timeless. The narrative’s misshapen but the filmmaking is powerful. The ending, however, is anathema, in which a supposed tribute to silent movies is depicted in tragically awful transfers, in the wrong ratio and in the sped-up fashion familiar from television in decades past but utterly unlike what was witnessed by the first audiences for these films. The suggestion that the character did several of Buster Keaton’s stunts also reeks. Based on the 1981 Bulgarian film, “Yo Ho Ho.” 117m. (Ray Pride)