The Fall

Director: Tarsem Singh

2006

21 April 2025

See

Roy (Lee Pace) a stunman in 1920s Hollywood movies is recovering from a broken back and heart in a hospital. Also healing from a broken arm is Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) a little immigrant girl who was picking oranges with her family when she had her own fall. Her father died not long before, she visits a despondent Roy who tells her a story which she paints with her imagination. 

Think

That is when the film really comes to life in a way that I’ve only seen Tarsem Singh do. Visuals I’d only seen before in his movie The Cell. I do love his acknowledgement of where he took from for further viewing. The filming locations made it not need special effects. This is a passion project done right, and as Roger Ebert said, there will never be another film like it. 

The way Tarsem described it to MUBI in their YouTube interview with him for the streaming release was insightful.

“Ebert was in charge, or the main critic in Toronto, and we were going to Toronto. So we went between Toronto. Two bad things happened. Ebert… got very bad cancer and could not come. And on the other hand, Harvey Weinstein asked me ‘can I see the film? Because I might buy it before’. I said, No… I want people to see it for the first time… We screened the film. Harvey Weinstein sat right in front … 15 minutes in… gets up… zigzag 10 times before leaving the theater saying, like, ‘Na, horrible.’ …After two years, Ebert got better, and I sent him the film, “there's never going to be a film like it.” Ebert, my little hero, came to save it and tried to give all the good reviews… Fortunately for me, things like college professors and cameramen and wardrobe people saw it, and then it stayed in the ether.”

Feel

Most of all this movie moves me, with the relationships between Roy and Alexandia. As Lee Pace said of those sharing scenes with Catinca Untaru in his MUBI interview.

“Reflecting back, I've worked for about 20 years since, with a lot of different actors, and the experience I had working with Catinca, it's the hardest thing and the easiest thing in the world to do, just relax and believe your character and believe the story. Catinca had nothing standing in the way of believing that story, she brought me right with her. I remember towards the end of the shoot I was like, ‘you know, Katinka, we're acting. We're actors. And this what actors do we play in a serious way, you're playing Alexandria, and you have a responsibility for that character. Roy is in pain. What do you want to do?’ And she was like, ‘I want him to be better’. And I was like, ‘What are you going to do to make him better?’ It was a long conversation, they were very long takes, I would tell the whole story and we would try to get the reality of it. I looked at her after the take, and I was like, ‘good job’. And she was looked at me back… She knew what she had accomplished. It was incredible. I've never had a scene partner like her.” 

It’s structured like a bedtime story with that same style of the fantastical and the real, illogical leaps, and development based on her misunderstanding. The transitions of the story from the hospital to the fantasy are stunning, like the priest smirking, to each of the heroes positioned in a desert setting. The three morphine pills she gets for him not knowing he wanted to commit suicide. Her being hurt finally getting him to snap out of it when Roy realises he cares about Alexandria more than the woman who got away with the start of the film he was in. And then there’s the surgery animation scene, and history of stunts montage she will always see him in.