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How’d you hurt your arm? - I fell
Me too
As the title suggests, The Fall begins with an accident.
Two accidents actually.
A Hollywood stuntman named Roy has broken his legs,
and a little girl named Alexandria has broken her arm.
Hey, do you know you’re named after Alexander the Great?
Who was the greatest warrior who ever lived.
When Roy meets Alexandria in the opening of the film, he tells her about Alexander the Great,
and we are transported to the faraway lands of her imagination
to experience the story with a childlike sense of wonder.
Although this story is a short one, it sets the stage for what is to come.
Hey, why don’t you come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you a different story.
An epic tale of love and revenge.
You know what epic means?
The Fall is not the first film to tell a story within a story, but it certainly is a special one.
Having filmed in more than 24 countries over the course of 4 years,
the spectacular, yet very real locations it portrays offer fantastical visuals that never feel artificial,
that always keep us grounded in the realism of its images.
This also serves an important function regarding the film’s themes.
At first glance,
The Fall is a film about how children make sense of the world through the power of imagination.
But examining it more closely, it’s not just a film about a girl’s escape into fantasy.
While the film indeed shows us the wondrous inner world of Alexandria,
it is Roy who is the storyteller.
First of all, he didn’t have a horse, and he wasn’t in the middle of any old buildings,
he was lost in the middle of a vast desert.
It is Roy who provides the words, and Alexandria who brings them to life,
often by drawing on the things she encountered in real life.
As Roger Ebert wrote in his review;
It is her imagination that creates the images of Roy's story,
and they have a purity and power beyond all calculation.
Roy is her perfect storyteller, she is his perfect listener,
and together they build a world.
So what world did they build together?
To answer this question, we first have to understand the circumstances of Roy and Alexandria’s relation.
Will you tell me the story now?
What Story?
The epic.
Allright.
Allright, close your eyes.
What do you see?
Initially, Roy tells Alexandria a story about a group of bandits in search of revenge against an evil governor.
This Odious, it’s bad man?
Oh yeah.
At first, the tale seems somewhat random,
a swashbuckling adventure with lots of excitement to captivate Alexandria,
but then;
Tell me Alexandria, do you read English?
You always stop at the same part when it’s very beautiful.
It quickly becomes evident that Roy merely uses the story as a way to manipulate Alexandria
into stealing morphine for him.
I need the pills to finish the story, understand?
The reason being that deep down, Roy is at the end of his rope.
Not just because of his accident, but also because, as is revealed later,
the love of his life has left him for another man.
The problem is not his back, it’s a broken heart.
As a result, he has lost the will to live, and wants to commit suicide.
Alexandria finds the morphine pills, but innocently mistakes the ‘e’ at the end of the word morphine for ‘3’.
There’s only 3 in here.
Where there more pills in here?
Yeah.
What did you do with them?
I throw them away because you wrote m-o-r-p-h-i-n-3.
And so, as Roy contemplates other options, the story continues.
And I think it is at this point where we need to address Alexandria’s role in the bandit’s tale.
Are you trying to save my soul?
While Alexandria starts listening to Roy as a quiet observer,
she already begins to alter the story as is shown at the very beginning
when Roy introduces one of the bandits as being Indian.
Despite him meaning this bandit to be a man of Native American descent,
Alexandria imagines him as a man from India.
It’s a subtle misinterpretation, but it establishes early on that however the story unfolds,
it’s not going to be determined by Roy alone.
Over the course of the film, Alexandria slowly asserts herself as an active participant in the story.
Unlike Roy however, who merely uses the story as a tool for manipulation,
Alexandria is too innocent to separate reality and fiction with such deliberate intent,
and thus increasingly blurs their distinction.
I’m sorry about this.
Why?
I’m sorry.
Why?
In doing so, the story transforms,
it becomes more personal and begins to break down the walls that Roy put up around himself.
The story was just a trick to get you to do something for me.
It is no coincidence that the story begins with a masked bandit,
symbolizing how Roy masks his true intentions from Alexandria;
a mask that is slowly stripped away,
thereby revealing his most vulnerable self, and exposing its darkness to the light.
He knew that she was the woman he was supposed to love.
Please, please, now they can kiss kiss?
It is here that Alexandria also functions as a savior character,
a Christ-like role that is emphasized by the presence of oranges,
which, among other things, were used to symbolize divinity in paintings of baby Jesus.
The mystic was right.
The stony-faced priest had betrayed them.
When Roy is ready to let the tale come to an end,
she even injects herself into the story and becomes a literal savior for the despairing bandit.
Who are you?
It’s me dada!
Me!
Still, Roy keeps trying to end the story,
killing off character after character.
And yet, Alexandria refuses to accept the reality behind the story,
the truth that Roy has lost his spirit, and no longer believes he has anything to live for.
There’s no happy ending with me.
I still want to know.
Alexandria’s determination might seem like a naïve attempt to demand a happy ending
for the story she’s invested in, an act born from a childish sense of entitlement.
Why are you making everybody die?
It’s my story - Mine too.
But I believe there’s also a wisdom to be found here,
because by linking the masked bandit to Roy,
in Alexandria’s mind, they have become one and the same.
She’s not just trying to save a character in a story, she is trying to save her friend.
I don’t want you to die.
And as it turns out, this childlike inability to separate story from reality contains a remarkable power,
for it allowed Roy to project himself into a fictional world,
to articulate his inner self in a way that would otherwise remain unexpressed,
to reflect on his life as a story,
and stories, no matter how dark they get, can be retold.
They can always let in new characters, establish new relations.
They can always have unexpected twists, they can always have hope.
She loves him.
Don’t kill him.
And as we see in the Fall, this is true for our real lives as well.
The story we tell about ourselves may at times feel bleak and hopeless,
but as long as we allow others inside,
invite them beyond our masks,
and allow them to change our story,
it’s never truly without hope.
As one reviewer put it; if you were to let someone who loves you rewrite your story,
who would you be?
The film ends with the hospital patients watching a film, and we see, Roy, alongside the children,
watching in wonder, having reclaimed a part of himself that almost was lost.
He once again becomes a stuntman, and Alexandria talks about how much she enjoys the pictures
as any time a stunt happens, she imagines it to be Roy.
It captures the essential philosophy of The Fall;
a film about how stories and reality inform each other;
how we project real parts of ourselves into our fiction
and turn it into something meaningful.
It’s about stories as transformative experiences,
about stories that inspire us, that redeem us.
It’s about stories that save us.
Let him live.
Promise?
I promise.
It’s obvious that we live a time where there’s no shortage of stories,
but to find the truly special ones,
such as The Fall which was pretty much financed with the director’s own money,
I’m really glad I have MUBI.
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