The Fall (Tarsem, 2008)
My Summer Movies # 5
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«Film is seductive; and, like other forms of seduction, it is not pure. Our seducers come to us with all kinds of motives and methods; and we can be moved beyond our intelligence with beauty, logic, or truth, or we can be moved by emotion, lies, and violence. Sometimes we are moved by beautiful lies, sometimes by emotional logic, sometimes by violent truths. Tarsem has spoken of the lies that go into getting films made: “When you pitch a story to a Hollywood studio, you’re never telling the story you want to tell them; you’re telling them the story you think they want to hear,” he was quoted as saying by Beth Accomando in the online KPBS log Cinema Junkie, May 30, 2008. Tarsem, insistent on making the film he wanted to make, put his own money, much of it made from doing product commercials, into The Fall, which contains some of the most amazing sights (and sites) ever seen on film, as many different locations are used for the film’s settings, including, reportedly, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Egypt, England, Fiji, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Namibia, Romania, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. (Reports of the number of countries have varied, from eighteen to about thirty-four. Tarsem preferred geography to computer-generated imagery, CGI.) Tarsem told BlackBook magazine’s Ben Barna, “The Cell was all CGI and theater, on a stage, whereas The Fall was all landscapes” (April 27, 2008). The Fall, for which scenes in the reality portion were filmed first, followed by scenes in the fantasy portion, is a seductive movie about seduction.» (More here.)
