Review of The Fall (2006) by Jean-Francois V — 12 Jul 2010

I knew "The Fall" would be a beautiful film. Shot in a style reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl or the video for Black's "Wonderful World", it is set in the kind of places that traveling companies single out for their catalogues, and features attractive actresses (Justine Waddell, who has grown even more pretty since "Wives and Daughters"), splendid cars from the twenties, multicoloured costumes, etc - a real feast for the eyes, if you don't mind that kind of esthetics.

But what surprised me was that it was such a moving film, even if some might call it melodrama (a young girl with a broken arm is told stories by a depressive stuntman who has lost the will to live.) The little girl (Catinca Untaru) is perfect in the role, so much so that you feel she's not even acting in most of the scenes, that Lee Pace is just pulling her leg and she is in some sort of candid camera sketch.

I might have loved the film even more if my DVD player, probably suffering from a heat stroke, had not played a trick on me and randomised the various sequences, so that I got the final scene and the end titles after thirty minutes, and the rest of the film in complete disarray, with characters dying before they were introduced, and all sorts of moments that went nowhere, leaps in logic and out-of-the-blue references to scenes yet unseen.

That I managed to enjoy the film so much under these circumstances tells me that it is certainly even better without me doing the defragmentation in my head. This one (unlike Jennifer Lynch's "Surveillance") truly deserved a best picture award at the Sitges film festival. "Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!".