Tarsem’s Fall

Everyone who can should check out Tarsem’s recent work, the Fall. The director’s earlier the Cell had a rather distinctive visual style in the service of a kitschy narrative. The film was interested in exploring the boundary line between art and ‘reality’ even as the work seemed to repress its own anxiety that there might not be such a line. In effect there was something ‘terrible’ about such a knowledge in the Cell.


The Fall remedies some of these problems by offering a beautiful homage to cinema. Tarsem in this film might be magic realism’s truest cinematic aesthetician. It is on a visual level one of the most gorgeous films one will ever see. Where the earlier film seemed to be a quasi-moral tale the new film is about fables. In one sense Tarsem does not entirely solve the problem here. There is still (unlike say Pan’s Labyrinth) a somewhat neat division between the world of art/artifice and that of our own lives wherein stories become necessary. But by making the film a commentary on the nature of cinematic illusion and by making this more of a meta-work than the Cell Tarsem perhaps provides a more acceptable compromise. In any case his visuals are quite astonishing and worth the price of the ticket!

Tarsem might one day make a great film. He’s not there yet. But his trajectory has been intriguing so far, specially with this newest film. The Fall got not very good reviews from a critical establishment that pines for the artistically adventurous and yet refuses to recognize such a work when it appears. the same old stale categories of film criticism were invoked to critique this work and ultimately find it inadequate for failing tests of ‘narrative’. I think one must distinguish between ‘narrative’ and ‘narrativity’. A purely visual language can serve the latter just as well provided the director brings it off successfully.

The Fall is to my mind either a successful experiment or a magnificent failure. Either way it deserves to be seen.

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