Falling in Love

What can I say about The Fall? You just have to experience it.

It starts with a silent movie, a western. There's a stunt, a jump from a train trestle, an accident. Next, a little girl in a hospital. She writes a note and throws it out of her window to a nun. It lands in the room of the stuntman from the movie. The little girl goes down to meet him, and he offers to tell her a story.

That is the framing device, somewhat like The Princess Bride. An injured stuntman telling a story to a girl with the broken arm. She is about 10 years old, Eastern European, and broke her arm picking oranges. Maybe she is Armenian? They picked fruit in CA during the silent film days, didn't they?

But the story the stuntman tells: It's about a bandit and his 4 stout friends, all great heroes: an Indian (East Indian in the girl's imagination, but the stuntman constantly refers to his "squaw"), an African, a Russian named Luigi, Charles Darwin and his pet monkey Wallace (the brains of the pair), and a mystic. They have amazing adventures trying to save a princess from the evil Governor Odious. And what adventures.

The director, Tarsem Singh, traveled the worlds and filmed his heroes in the most amazing locations, including the Taj Mahal, the Observatory at Jaipur, Goah Gadjah in Bali, and the Hagia Sofia. The cinematography is breathtaking, the stories (though childish) are captivating. Our stuntman is quite a storyteller. (Note: there's a hint of Wizard of Oz when you see that the heroes are based on the girl's friends. "And you were there, and you..."

The stuntman is played by Lee Pace, with a nice Owen Wilson accent. But he isn't an easygoing nice guy - he has big problems. He may be paralyzed from his accident, his wife left him for the star, and he wants to kill himself. He will enlist the girl to help out if he can.

The little girl is played by10-year old Romanian Catinca Untaru. She speaks a very broken English, and is very believable. She too has had a hard life - "angry men" burned her house, her father is gone (fell from a horse?), her family works the orange groves, and she is the only one who speaks any English at all. But she is an adventurous spirit who is easy to love.

So, two narratives - a man and a girl, and the story they share. The story is enchanting and beautiful, and the teller and his audience are deep and interesting. A great movie.

Tarsem's other movie is the J. Lo vehicle The Cell. Is that worth watching?