The Fall

I had to check out the new restoration on mubi before it gets a physical release. One of my favorite films, The Fall is a love letter not just to film but to storytelling as a whole and the reasons why we tell stories and the reasons why people love stories. I have completely sappy reasons for loving the film and I think that that’s the kind of reaction that Tarsem Singh would like us to have when watching this film, to be honest. When I first saw this film in college it was a pirated rip that I had found shortly after finishing Pushing Daisies. I loved that show and I loved Lee Pace’s performance in it and was searching for nearly anything else that he was in when The Fall landed in my lap thanks to a random person on 4chan. I downloaded the rip and saved it to my external hard drive and had it playing one day while I was working on some assignments for my animation classes. I didn’t know what to expect, but I fell in love with the film the moment that the film featured basically a pinhole camera right as Alexandria first meets Roy. That’s magical. The film is just so layered, telling the story of not just the Black Bandit and his companions but also the lives of Alexandria and Roy themselves. Singh treats storytelling as a communication between artist and audience, that the back and forth between the two is what makes the story what it is. The storyteller tells the story but it is up to the audience to put the meaning in there. The wonderful thing about how The Fall does his is by having Alexandria’s interjections taken fully seriously, completely retconning parts of the story as they happen, because it doesn’t matter if the story makes sense, what matters is if people feel something. Throughout the course of the film we are forming a connection with Roy and Alexandria purely through what they are putting in the story and how that is influenced by the world around them. The context for their story choices are slowly drip fed to us as Alexandria goes about the hospital. The story being told is her interpretation of it, as the slow reveal shows us exactly where Roy’s influences were pulled from and how Alexandria’s innocence is what gives the story its larger, more epic, feel.