Maya-jaal. Now rhyme it with The Fall.
Surrealism. Check. Magic realism. Check.
An infirmary with its One flew over the cuckoo’s nest environment. Check. Check again. Or may be not. An infirmary in WWI times. No money. No Rajesh Khanna for optimism. No O’ Henry either. A disproportioned Pan’s Labyrinth kid girl with dysfunction and dreams.
Exotica. Ya right. Go on.
Americana Exotica.
Blood Brothers. Separated by blood.
“My father is dead”.
Grief has gone. Enter smile. Pirates. Correction bandits. Four corners of the earth. Wherever they are.
Governor Odious. Good name for a villain. Otta Benga. Even better. Go on. Alexandria. Oh, that reminds me of…yes I know. Alexander. Alexander The Great. Stranded in magnanimity. The water episode. Stupid? Exemplary? Stupid.
Maps. Human maps. Maps on a human. Let’s navigate now.
Wallace the Monkey. Darwin the Charles. The Tashan.
Mystic. Nature man. Birds in the belly. Trees in the heart. He hates Odious too.
The greener pastures are a stone’s throw away. So are what-you-wish-er pastures. Yellow. Green. Blue.
Hymns-sages-symphonies. Sages in unison. Hymns on Sivamani.
“When you run, it poisons faster”.
Everybody let’s jump! Everybody let’s dance! Everybody let’s fall!
Princess falls. The lesser fortunate of the twins falls. Raja falls. Rani falls. Jog falls. Niagara falls.
Ebert calls it “a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into unchartered realms.”
Pyramids. Check. Muddy chants. Check. The ballet of the Orient. Check(what does it mean, though?)
Flashbacks in pan. “You better get your ass out before we pan out of your flashback!”
African slave. “Kill the fish” slave.
Indian. Check. “I mean Indian Indian. What is this? Repeat. Who is this?!”
This is an Indian. Costumes. Curiosity-conscious eyebrows in the sun.
Butterfly. The Butterfly Effect. Chaos Theory. Keep going. Evolution. Dragonfly. Darwin.
“Why the mask again?”
“Boys, she is mine!”
The revenge that paused to catch a breath. Huff.
So the bandits kidnap the princess and flee on horses. Horses. Check. Leave behind the little nephew. Nephew should be cute. Buddhist. Check.
Lake Palace. “A palace that is covered by a lake on all sides” Thanks.
The Masked Bandit – the scourge of the south-east.
“She is a nun”.
“What it does is set you free.”
“Did you get the message?”
Film trickery. Stunt artist. Stuntman. He did the things nobody else could. What? What? What?
I want don’t want want don’t want to be a bandit.
Big blue city. Dig blue city. They painted it blue city.
Bandits painted the city blue.
Monkey tries to catch the butterfly. Monkey falls. Monkey gets shot. The Monkees. The Tashan.
“Aah, it was a natural order of things, Darwin mused, they will pay you well for Darwin’s hide”.
“You are making this up!”
He never took an oath. He had his fingers crossed. “Show me your fingers. All of them.”
“You have captivated my heart, Evelyn. I can’t come out of captivity. I am not a man who deserves to be loved.”
“I didn’t save you. You are my savior”
Drama at the Taj. The original one I mean. Not the Apollo Bunder.
The locket with a screenplay. CUT.
“Did you ever sleep in your dream?”
CUT TO FILM REVIEW
The Fall is a keen observation of human emotions, in the timid eyes of Alexandria, her unstructured semi-conversations with Roy, the slight drop of worldly wisom, which when used on kids in film exposes a paranormal possibility – Did she control her past? Can she predict the future? Is she more than what meets the eye? These are some of the many questions Tarsem so delightfully assembles in a what could be easily be a fable of fables. Alexandria is our everyman point of view of fantasy, where an ‘Indian’ could be anything from a Jarmusch costume-driven poetry to a very LXG-bearded and unrelentingly exotic youngblood, an Italian could escape a backstory and yet stay true to his ‘powers’(fireworks, mostly), the masked regalia of a Hero could be the most majestic Robinhood known to this side of Nickolodeon until he finds himself at crossroads of loyalty – to kill the bad guy or to kiss the bride-to-be?
Even while this child play at work(and there IS a nod to the Child’s Play fans) seems fulfilling for a feast, Tarsem never quite likes to say, “good enough”. And he yet again breaks and shakes his imagination, goes back to the first page, has a lassi, breaks a leg(quite literally, and lots at that), and pushes the bloody envelope, if there exists one.
It has been some time since I came across a film that blew me, both in its form and its world view, something that redefines impossibility. The Fall might be the end of my search.
Tarsem is a ‘hand it to him’ guy. You don’t want to put him to court.
He takes every minute Freudian slip to heart. And reminds you how significant each slip is. Be it the Mystic with a belly full of birds, or the rampant and infamous gap in the front teeth, the passionate romance played out exuberantly with lipsticks, barren landscapes, syringes, bottles of pills, eye masks, metaphor-laden butterflies, colored city walls, medieval fortresses minus Kama Sutra, and a self-respecting pair of dentures, he knows what he is talking about.
One of the few good things about the latest summer blockbuster, Kungfu Panda, was a thinking Jack Black, a Jack Black without the mad staring eyes. And the film gave us a few phrases to throw around. “Oooh, my tenders”, and this mad word called ‘awesomeness’. How does that relate to The Fall? By the time The Fall lives its name and smacks you in the face, it just begins to register its awesomeness. That’s for the how. And that’s that. From then on, its what the wannabe-Spielberg-but-no-money fantasized(in happy hours) about all night on the street outside the movie theater with running lights – redemptions in their liberal extreme, fantastic pay-offs just when you couldn’t wait any longer to utter ‘wow’, grayscale, slo-mos, puppetry, B&W scratch tapes, add any more if you will. Seldom the desert monotones of Aravalis have been so delightfully fucked around with on a big screen extravaganza, and with a shocking amount of belief.
Alexandria: They burned it.
Roy Walker: Who burned it?
Alexandria: Angry people.
Roy Walker: I’m sorry to hear that.
Alexandria: Hmm?
Roy Walker: I said I’m sorry to hear that.
Alexandria: [confused] …angry people.
Roy Walker: Yeah, I know I’m just sorry. I’m sorry that your house got burned.
The Fall amongst inciting other thoughts, makes me think about fluidity of story. A cleverly sold disbelief, on the premise of something as innocent as a handicapped child. That’s on the surface. At a deeper level, it has a heart of a film maker fully engaged with what he says and does not say. Even if takes going back to his Dum Mast Qalandar India, even if it takes earning money through commercial art projects, if the end result is as complete as The Fall, Tarsem deserves a standing ovation for his ‘labor of love’, as clichéd as it might sound. This film, as has been written before, deserves to go beyond the ‘cool-poster-with-big-names-great-reviews-out-of-love-for-the-radical-not-sure if I wanna see it’ pedestal. Forget Lord of the Rings, and all its epic box office collections. Forget Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Torro will earn a lifetime salary with Hellboy II, The Fall might not hold on much longer if it does not cross over. The reason I say this, is because of personal observations, I feel the film is free of a language, and god knows who put an R certificate on it. May be Fincher and Jonze found it cool.
I saw the film in a bad to moderate occupancy, but by the time the titles rolled, not a single soul moved out, as we saw the credits for crews who worked on some 20 or more countries to shoot this film. The music credits included Tarsem’s name. I guess it was the beat-laden piece, which is riveting for its grip and almost pot-friendly if I might add an adjective. Ebert’s review does help, but considering he is rating every fourth film high off late, there really is a finer distinction needed for what he really thinks baked his cookie. IMDb. I don’t know who votes there. I used to do it in the days of the Raj. Rotten Tomatoes. May be. Metacritic. May be.
As per me, I smell a Black Friday vibe around The Fall. The same great film doesn’t need publicity funda, albeit a lot different. Entertainment Weekly has the film debuting at #14 in its last week’s top twenty. But look at the gross income, and the number of screens. And this does not spell indie=either quick or miraculous recovery/critical acclaim either. There are other indies doing the round. And they do deserve the attention too. The Visitor, The Promotion(not really an indie), The Foot Fist Way, Kit Kittredge, The Duchess of Langeais(more of a foreign import with acclaim), Surfwise(a wise crack docu), War Inc., Fugitive Pieces, When did you last see your father, Refusenik(docu on cold war/soviet Jews) are some of the un-Hulk and un-Summer blockbuster material showing at the arthouses.
But for obvious reasons, The Fall does stand apart. Not only for its exuberant budget and scale, but for its accessibility. After all the high talks about the film, and moreover coming from Tarsem who made that-film-with-J-Lo, it might sound like a mindtrip only to be seen with additives, but to tell you the truth, it is a simple story, told with childlike storytelling, and like Mainak said, “it is the best children film for adults”.
If I ever go to a film school, this is what I wanna study.
Acknowledgements:
Dabba
Google
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
glad you enjoyed it as much as i did, and your write-up is far more interesting than mine.
Thanks. ye to khushi ke aansoo hain. :-)
Times in Chicago seem to be well spent!! when are you back?
in 3 weeks.
you still coming to see striker’s play in DC? when?
i really need to watch this one to make a head and tail outta this. Maybe there is no head and tail. Glad if there isn’t. Just went through a mile long head kidhar hain tail kdhar hain piece.. and that’s after my exams even. Terrific piece. It’s like those polish posters where i hope to hell the movie lives up to it.
Tushar: Ebert uses a four star rating scale, so by simple probability every “fourth” film will be highly rated.
What an amazing movie man! Really, what a movie!
Every scene, every color, every transition – what a brilliant visually exotic film.
Tushy, I agree with that statement at first – My quest for that visual treat I thought ended with Frozen – this is way and beyond where frozen took me.
I missed Tarsem in NYC and again at IFFLA(if I remember right, he did not come, but I missed the movie as well…). I don’t want to write about the fall after this brilliant write-up; let’s leave this as the cornerstone of what this movie means to us…
Wasn’t the girl C.Untaru cute… she mis-spells the words, the picking of the nose… what an opening sequence… the HORSE!, the FALL! Brilliant!
Let’s talk about this sometime over a beer tushy, maybe with Ranga bhai and dabba too…
Did i mention it before – brilliant write-up, as usual!!!
Glad that you checked it out and liked it, Bhai.
The Fall is slowly growing, and grow it should, and it will, gradually, as other movies face the test of time, this is one of those that will stay. I need to watch it again. The girl was cute yeah. I remember the loud cackles it inspired in the can’t decide what to do audience. Tarsem brings it home brilliantly, not compromising a bit on any of that cockiness.
Beer and good cinema anytime dude.
amen brother!