See What Sticks: The Fall

By Keith Uhlich

Interesting that Tarsem Singh's The Fall is opening the same day as The Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer adaptation. They're both the saturated-color ramblings of children (quite literally in The Fall's case), and all the more fascinating for all the surface infantalization. Neither can be said to "work" in any traditional sense, but for the willing, they cast a rather remarkable spell, like Svengali or Mesmer on a longed-for beloved. If Speed Racer is the more accomplished of the two films, it's no doubt due to the hermetically sealed nature of its mostly (if not entirely) green-screened production. The Fall is much more frayed and ramshackle, befitting both its central conceit (a constantly metamorphosizing fable subject to the various whims of its dual narrators) and the fact that Tarsem and his crew shot the film in fits and starts over four years in 15-plus countries.
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