The Fall (Tarsem Singh, 2006)

[colinr0380]

What is disheartening for me is that I fear this may be the last Tarsem Singh film I will enjoy given that he appears to have now become a hired hand for big budget multiplex entertainments.

The recent loss of Eiko Ishioka might have some effect on the look of Tarsem's films as well post-Immortals.

The "story" in THE FALL is based on emotions and events in the lead character's life, dressed up as a costume adventure to hook in the little girl. By its nature, the story is not well thought out but reflects the disposition of the storyteller on any given day that he is telling the story. This is similar to how THE TREE OF LIFE seemingly presents random moments from a man's childhood out of chronological order to represent how memory works. In THE FALL, the story's success as one continuous narrative is not as important as how it reflects the lead character's perception of his circumstances.

Exactly, though for a less high culture reference I see The Fall as mining a similar plot structure as The Princess Bride.

[warren oates]

I agree with the stuff Roger Ryan's been writing. The Princess Bride is a good reference too, in terms of another fantasy film with a frame narrative concerned with the art and act of storytelling. Though I'd say that it probably has a "better" (or at least more conventionally satisfying?) story-within-a-story because it's not tasked with being anything other than a thrilling and comic adventure that holds the attention of young Fred Savage. There's no reflection of the emotional state of the teller or the needs of the listener in the tale, which is more of what, per Roger Ryan, The Fall is properly about.

[Mr Sausage]

The comparison to One Thousand and One Nights has some structural logic, but this isn't a compilation of short stories, each of which is complete in itself- apart from the Alexander opening, it's one long, rambling story that goes nowhere.

It's an episodic quest story, one of the oldest kinds of stories around. The point isn't the destination, it's the individual adventures (read: episodes) that happen along the way. It's a Romance narrative, and therefore an appropriate one for an adult to tell a kid because it never has to end. This kind of story telling is not a gimmick. You're essentially dismissing one of the major narrative traditions of Western (even Eastern) culture.

The Fall and Pan's Labyrinth are doing two completely different types of things. Only in a vague and general kind of way could they be comparable.

[warren oates]

Thanks, Mr. Sausage for putting in such an erudite, succinct and assertive manner what I was groping toward in some of those other posts.

[matrixschmatrix]

It's an episodic quest story, one of the oldest kinds of stories around. The point isn't the destination, it's the individual adventures (read: episodes) that happen along the way. It's a Romance narrative, and therefore an appropriate one for an adult to tell a kid because it never has to end. This kind of story telling is not a gimmick. You're essentially dismissing one of the major narrative traditions of Western (even Eastern) culture.

The episodic quest isn't a gimmick, but the self consciously made-up-as-it goes metafictionality specific to the way The Fall constructs that quest is. Then too, the classical romances had an elaborate series of signs and signifiers embedded in the events within the quest, whereas unless I missed them the majority of the events in the story-within-the-story of The Fall are at best Jodorowsky symbolism-signifying-nothing, or banal 'this person is like that person taken from my life' constructions where both the inner and outer story versions of the character were flat and unintersting. Mostly, it seemed like things were chosen just to be the prettiest pictures available.

To me, the movie didn't add up to become anything, and the individual parts were nice to look at but didn't hold my attention well. Though again, I did like the performance from the little Romanian girl.

[Mr Sausage]

The episodic quest isn't a gimmick, but the self consciously made-up-as-it goes metafictionality specific to the way The Fall constructs that quest is.

The 'gather round while I tell ye a tale' motif is not a gimmick, either. It too is an old, old trope. The 1001 Nights was brought up. You can also bring up The Decameron and Heptameron, or The Canterbury Tales.

Then too, the classical romances had an elaborate series of signs and signifiers embedded in the events within the quest, whereas unless I missed them the majority of the events in the story-within-the-story of The Fall are at best Jodorowsky symbolism-signifying-nothing, or banal 'this person is like that person taken from my life' constructions where both the inner and outer story versions of the character were flat and unintersting.

If the Romance is allegorical, then yes. If not, not. That's neither here nor there, nor is it inherent to this type of story structure. That type of allegory is not much in use anymore, mostly because it depends on universal signs, something post-modernism has made impossible.

What The Fall is doing is counterposing what is typically (tho' not accurately) considered a naive form of storytelling with the more cynical experiences of the real world. The title refers not just to the literal fall of the lead male, but also to the archetypal fall from innocence into experience. The movie uses the counterpoint between the two forms (archetypal story and realistic story) to represent the first steps of a child entering the adult world, and in that it is an effective movie because it chooses to understand, and represent, adolescence through the narrative modes associated with it

Pan's Labyrinth, on the other hand, has no clear understanding of the relationship between fantasy and reality (and indeed allows reality to overwhelm fantasy for large parts of it). With its lack of an anchoring point of view for the fantastical elements, too many confusing or muddying ambiguities are created for the movie to offer any coherent vision of the role of imagination in life. What you mostly get in Pan's Labyrinth is the same story being told twice, once from an objective point of view, once from the distorted point of view of a child. It's a movie built on a redundancy. The two sides come increasingly to resemble each other anyways, so you may even think that the Spanish civil war is being flattened out and simplified into a crude children's fantasy.

[matrixschmatrix]

What The Fall is doing is counterposing what is typically (tho' not accurately) considered a naive form of storytelling with the more cynical experiences of the real world. The title refers not just to the literal fall of the lead male, but also to the archetypal fall from innocence into experience. The movie uses the counterpoint between the two forms (archetypal story and realistic story) to represent the first steps of a child entering the adult world, and in that it is an effective movie because it chooses to understand, and represent, adolescence through the narrative modes associated with it

Pan's Labyrinth, on the other hand, has no clear understanding of the relationship between fantasy and reality (and indeed allows reality to overwhelm fantasy for large parts of it). With its lack of an anchoring point of view for the fantastical elements, too many confusing or muddying ambiguities are created for the movie to offer any coherent vision of the role of imagination in life. What you mostly get in Pan's Labyrinth is the same story being told twice, once from an objective point of view, once from the distorted point of view of a child. It's a movie built on a redundancy. The two sides come increasingly to resemble each other anyways, so you may even think that the Spanish civil war is being flattened out and simplified into a crude children's fantasy.

Hah, someone mentioned that The Fall was a fantasy for people who don't care for fantasy, and I think you're demonstrating that here- the key to Pan's Labyrinth is that there is no line between fantasy and reality, and that the fantastic world has as much inherent validity as the real- whereas in The Fall the fantastic world is never allowed to have any sense that it is a real place in any meaningful way, and the distinction thus could not be sharper.

In Pan's Labyrinth, the 'adult' world of understanding, power politics, and cynicism is a nightmare to be avoided at any cost- it represents a surrender of one's inner life, not an attainment of experience. The Fall is about the construction and deconstruction of a pleasant but ultimately destructive lie, and the thinness of the story within the story follows from the point it is making there. To me, though, Pan's Labyrinth is an infinitely richer experience.

[Mr Sausage]

Hah, someone mentioned that The Fall was a fantasy for people who don't care for fantasy, and I think you're demonstrating that here- the key to Pan's Labyrinth is that there is no line between fantasy and reality, and that the fantastic world has as much inherent validity as the real-

You can perhaps make the point that the movie is arguing for the validity of treating reality (represented by historical events) in a fantastical manner because such a treatment can capture essential truths. But then Pan's Labyrinth would have to have captured some essential truth with its naive representation of complex historical events. Does it?

whereas in The Fall the fantastic world is never allowed to have any sense that it is a real place in any meaningful way, and the distinction thus could not be sharper.

This is an enormously silly point to make. You're just saying that a non-real place is not a real place.

But this does inadvertently point to the very reason why The Fall is a stronger movie than Pan's Labyrinth. The latter uses lots of CGI that, for the most part, creates a world that is totally recognizable from other sources, full of fairies, fauns, little people in magical kingdoms, and all manner of fairy tale cliches. The Fall uses practical effects and, most importantly, real world locations and happenings (a real desert, an elephant swimming) and films them in such a way as to make them seem unreal and fantastic. This is the mark of great fantasy: that it makes the real world seem unrecognizable. That is a real imaginative achievement. That the movie then uses its fantasy to represent the introduction of a child into adolescence is a marvelous conceit.

The conjunction of fantasy and reality in Pan's Labyrinth has the effect of making reality seem like movie fakery, where once again the leader of the political group no one likes is a sneering monster who at the end all but literally becomes the shambling hand-eyed monster that represented him earlier. The effect is that the whole war story becomes a black-and-white, naive fantasy of the kind we are all so used to seeing in movies that don't have any explicitly fantastical elements. Pan's Labyrinth doesn't really know what it's saying about fantasy, reality, or the imagination because it cannot make up its mind if it wants the real to be fantastic or the fantastic to be real. Maybe the world is really like this, or not like this at all, or somewhere in between. Who knows. Certainly not the movie.

[Mr Sausage]

Immortals discussion moved here.