(Livejournal friends, I am still obsessing, so feel free to skip over this.)



Several nice people have asked me to expand on my defense of Tarsem Singh’s masterwork The Fall and since I could talk about this movie until my tongue falls out, I am happy to oblige. If you are as insanely devoted to it as I am, come on in and see if you agree with me on desert islands, blue cities and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

In that first post—where I argued why the five bandits are all aspects of Roy’s character—I briefly mentioned that the mystic represents Alexandria and a couple of people asked me to explain. The mystic emerges from a tree in the same way that Alexandria has come (fallen) out of a tree. The mystic’s home has been burned by Odious. Alexandria’s house was burned by angry people. The mystic holds birds in his belly, birds being a symbol of hope as Alexandria represents hope and a new start for Roy. At first, the Masked Bandit insists that he has no use for a mystic, just as Roy believes he has no use for Alexandria’s love and message of healing, because he and the Masked Bandit are bent on self-destruction.

But most enchanting—for me, anyway—is that the mystic SPEAKS IN GIBBERISH! Just like Alexandria’s love note. And the only one who can understand him is Darwin, who I believe represents Roy’s rational self.

Roy continually insists that Alexandria’s love note is written in gibberish. It’s not, as we see in the opening scenes. We can read it. Roy can’t read it because he is closed off to the power of love and so it is gibberish to him.



And while on the surface, it appears that Odious represents the actor that Roy’s girlfriend left him for, by the end, Odious becomes a part of Roy as well. By having Odious give voice to everything Roy hates and is ashamed of in himself, Odious becomes Roy’s true enemy, his own self-loathing. “Is Odious a bad man?” “Oh yeah.” More than you know, Roy.

Last time, I talked about how the surprising beauty of many of the epic sequences can distract you from the deeper symbolic meanings and thematic motifs. A good example of this is the Blue City that surrounds Odious’s palace. If you don’t know about the city of Jodhpur, you will probably spend most of that sequence going “Wait, okay, that CAN’T be real. This has to be CGI. There isn’t really an entirely blue city out there in the world.” But there is. And it wasn’t used in the film just because it’s there and it would be cool to film it. It has a symbolic meaning.

Think back to the opening of the epic with the bandits stranded on a desert island surrounded by a butterfly blue sea. The palace of Odious is an island surrounded by the sea of the Blue City, evoking that same imagery. Only this time, the bandits are seeking to enter this isolated landscape rather than escape it. This is Roy making the decision to cut himself off from life, rushing headlong into self-destruction. “It’s suicide,” Luigi warns. “We’re going,” Roy says.



Another moment that might slip by is the execution scene, where you’re thinking “Okay, is that really the Taj Mahal? Are they really filming in front of the Taj Mahal??? How is that even possible?” But here is the Masked Bandit attempting to execute the woman he loves but who he believes has betrayed him in front of (or rather, behind) the world’s greatest architectural symbol of enduring love. Here, Tarsem Singh presents a moment of audacious brilliance with an almost casual ease, as though it’s just what he does. Because it is. Just what he does.

These scenes are proof positive that this is not simply a string of dazzling but empty images filmed before settings chosen just because they were visually stunning. They were carefully considered. They mean something in the context of the story.



In my first post, I covered the symbolism of butterflies, elephants and oranges. There are other motifs throughout the film that aren’t as strongly significant but that add a texture that ties elements of the story together, like the horse that is pulled from the river in the title sequence, the horse killed in the accident that maimed Roy, is cleverly referenced in a marionette of a rather nightmarish horse figure, hanging from the wall of the children’s ward, by several rocking horses in the hospital setting as well as in the clever little bit of camera obscura with the horse literally turned upside down. And of course, there is the fact that Alexandria’s father was murdered over the theft of his horse. Is it likely she would have been in the orange groves if her father had not been killed? Horses, in an odd way, have brought these two together.

I’ve already talked about the symbolism of the costumes like Alexandria’s elephant gray sweater, Darwin’s butterfly coat and Evelyn’s butterfly mask. Another interesting costume is that of the Masked Bandit himself. There is more to his sleeveless tunic than the designer’s desire to show off Lee Pace’s bare arms. (Not that we didn’t appreciate that.) When Alexandria first meets Roy, she peers under his bed and the camera lingers on a stiff leather back brace on the floor next to the bed. This is a clue to Roy’s injury but it also points to the Masked Bandit’s stiff, restrictive tunic, tailored to within a millimeter of his body, which mimics the back brace. The gold frogging down the front evokes Roy’s chest x-rays.



There is also a deep vein of spirituality throughout this film. In the real world of the hospital setting, the priest is a warm and kindly figure but in the epic, he is Odious’s man, betraying the Masked Bandit. Roy—who recognizes the Eucharist—is either Catholic or at least has some religious upbringing. He understands that suicide is a mortal sin and that the priest would stand against such an act. In the epic, the priest betrays the Bandit at the same time real world Roy has taken the pills he believes will end his life.

It’s interesting that one of the deleted scenes would have expanded on the role of the priest in the epic. In this scene, as Roy tells the story, the priest is about to murder Evelyn’s abandoned nephew. Roy is unable to see any salvation for himself within his faith so in the epic, he makes the priest evil. But Alexandria steps in and alters this part of the story, insisting that no, the priest is good. And so he saves the little boy from a snake, a biblical symbol of sin. I understand why this scene was cut in a film that was already running long. It isn’t strictly necessary but it does add another layer to the religious aspects of the film. (Unfortunately, cutting it leaves that one annoying, dangling thread of the nephew hanging from the finished film.)

Luigi’s costume evokes the Catholic church with his cassock-style coat and his biretta-inspired cap, standing at odds with Luigi’s explosive temper and his role as representative of Roy’s suicidal desire. Where Darwin, in his butterfly coat is the most spiritual of the bandits, evoking God in a tongue-in-cheek nod to the opposition of church and science. (In the deleted scene, the priest calls out to Darwin but Luigi urges him not to listen.) While Alexandria, who brings with her the innocence that comes before the theological fall of man, is Roy’s salvation. In the nightmare surgery sequence, several robed priests operate on Alexandria, pulling from her head her diamond-patterned gibberish love note, which they puzzle to understand in the way that theologians have always struggled to understand and translate divine love, while doll-Alexandria is pinned to the table like the butterfly souls around her. If there is a Christ figure in this film, it is Alexandria.



Let’s talk a bit about the music that begins and ends this film, the famous second movement from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the Allegretto. Now this is a wonderful piece of music in its own right, justly adored from the moment it premiered, where the audience demanded an imediate encore. There is no “story” to the Seventh Symphony. It simply is. But significant to the film, this movement is a double variation. That is, it is made up of two different themes and there are variations on both themes that are repeated in a pattern, the two themes shifting between different sections of the orchestra. This makes it a perfect match for a film that is a study on shared storytelling. I’m not saying that’s why it was chosen but I think it makes a pretty good argument.

I was asked what I think the title means. Obviously, the story is full of falls: the initial falls that bring both Roy and Alexandria to the hospital, the fall of the Indian’s “squaw,” the fall of the Indian himself, Darwin’s fall, Alexandria’s second fall in the dispensary. Then there are metaphorical falls, as Alexandria falls in love with Roy and Roy falls from grace in his attempted suicide. But perhaps most directly, I think the title refers to Roy’s fall into despair, to be caught and held up by Alexandria.

The kindly doctor warns Alexandria’s mother that if Alexandria returns to the orange groves, “She’ll fall. She surely will fall.” But in the end, we see that she has gone back to the groves because sometimes you have to risk the fall.

Finally, I think the key to the ending lies in which symbols used in the film hold the greatest power. Measured in those terms, there is only one ending. Did she save him? Of course she did.