2008-06-09
I first heard of Tarsem Singh When I was in Mumbai during my internship with Ulka. He was God to most copywriters aspiring to be filmmakers in those days and I think he still is. He was in Mumbai back then for a talk and the event was sold out and the people at agencies stood outside the auditorium and heard him on boom boxes specially fixed outside for people who couldn’t get in. I wasn’t there but I wish I was. I saw The Fall yesterday what an experience! From his Levis ads to ‘The Cell’ to his videos for REM, the visual intensity in his work has been so vigorous. He is “The” Visual director of this generation.
Coming back to ‘The Fall’. It had all the Tarsem elements. The barren landscapes, the intense colors, the surreal artistic elements and the rest. The main plot was set in the 1920’s Hollywood where a suicidal stunt man who has lost all feeling in his legs, tells an epic story to Alexandria (Catinca Untaru, who is in the same hospital recovering) to make her steal morphine for him to OD on. The story he tells is the sub plot which is intertwined with the actual plot line. It is wildly imaginative and resonates so true to the story. It is meticulous and not one detail is wrong. Catinca Untaru is as real as they get. She is a definite find.Visually I saw many influences from Godfrey Reggio’s Quatsi to Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson’s Baraka.
There were visual elements from Ramayana and Mahabharatha as well. For instance when Otta Benga gets shot by several arrows, he falls on the bed of arrows like our own Pitamah Bhishma. The Kidnapping of the Indian’s squaw like in Ramayana. There were elements from many folk tales I grew up with. From Russian to American. The film was shot in several locations out of which I recognized Namibia, Jodhpur, Agra, Prague (the bridge) Paris, China and the island which I assumed to be near French Polynesia. There were several other locations. For the entire list please click here. What made the film really special for me were shots like when Alexandria is looking at her finger by closing one eye at a time and the whole perspective changes.
The pin hole camera effect, where she sees the(upturned) horse arrive outside and the whole opening gambit in extreme slow motion.Overall the movie was a very satisfying experience. The thing that I thought was not resonating with the story as such was the whole surreal element, when the imagined story plays out (most of us don’t imagine stories in Tarsem visuals). But then it is his movie and it is his style. I went to see this movie for these visuals. But just a mention. No one blames Hitchcock for making suspense thrillers now, do they? So I give it 5 stars. I wish it was shot on
imax film or just upscaled to imax. I was disappointed to see that it was released only in art house circuits.I saw it at the Aquarius theater which is a nice independent/foreign/art film theater but to see something like this on the small screen of Aquarius is not the way to do it.
To sum it up, one of the best films I have seen.