The Fall feels like a gift of a movie for which we should all send Tarsem Singh a thank you note. It is so lovely, and so bold. It is utterly original while feeling as if it fills a hole our collective unconscious needed filling. It is a film that would not have been made by a studio or rather, it is a movie a studio would fund and then immediately demand crippling changes. Why do you need to film this scene in Tunisia when we have a perfectly fine desert between here and Las Vegas? Why don't the characters go to Vegas? How about we make the little girl a teenager, played by Miley Cirus? You know what this film really needs? Brad Pitt.
Singh obviously had enough insider experience to know he didn't want to make that movie. Instead he spent his own money. He traveled accross the globe. He told the story he wanted to tell which it turns out was a story well worth telling. Can you call something like this a "vanity project"? Is a vanity project defined by its birth or its outcome? All great artists believe they have something to share with the world, whether the world knows it or not. Unfortunately, so do alot of really bad artists. Based on the result of this "vanity project", though, I would have to say that Tarsem has redeemed the concept for a while, or at least until Oliver Stone's W comes out, at which point the vanity project will no doubt once again be stained with self-absorbed badness. Thank God we can all go watch The Fall again instead.
Article comments
1 - Hal O'Brien
"The result was also, interestingly enough, a film that 100% of my male acquaintances consider the most horrifying, time-stopping, hellish chick flick experience of their lives."
What an odd and limited circle of male acquaintances you must have. This says far more about them than about The English Patient.