A Fairy Tale To Die For

If "The Fall" proves anything, it's this: The music-video auteur lives!

What a shame, then, that this epic extravagance arrives about 20 years after the heyday of stylish-yet-vapid, MTV-driven filmmaking. Director Tarsem Singh is best known for making the St. Sebastian-obsessed video to R.E.M.'s greatest hit — 1991's "Losing My Religion" — and for giving Jennifer Lopez a pre-J.Lo leg up in the "Silence of the Lambs" knockoff "The Cell."

Since then, Mr. Singh has spent a considerable stretch of time jetting around the planet with a camera crew. Filmed on locations in nearly two dozen countries, from India to Czechoslovakia, "The Fall" is an inflation of the 1981 Bulgarian film "Yo Ho Ho." It's also a terribly ambitious effort to recapture the glories of such old-timey Hollywood swashbucklers as "The Thief of Baghdad." Except the director eschews back-lot verisimilitude for exotic wide-screen vistas, landscapes dotted with grandiose ruins, and busloads of extras garbed in flowing ceremonial costumes, whirling through their geometrically choreographed paces. An air of mysticism lends these interludes the feel of Jodorowsky Lite, as if the hallucinatory fugue of "The Holy Mountain" could be evoked as a really expensive car commercial. Ironically, this is a movie whose subject is storytelling, and there's just not very much of a story.

"The Fall" is grounded in much homier circumstances. Roy (Lee Pace) is a silent-movie cowboy who has shattered his body in a stunt gone awry. He's now stuck in a hospital bed, where he spends the days mooning away. It's not only the accident that's done him in. His fiancée has dumped him, too. He's ready to end it all, but his injuries make it impossible for him to break into the drug supply and steal enough morphine to get the job done.

That's where Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) comes in. The girl is something like the hospital's mascot, a precocious tot who rarely stays confined to the pediatric ward. Despite their age differences, she develops a huge crush on Roy. He befriends her, and it soon dawns on him that she can fetch his morphine. To win her over, he begins telling her a long folktale involving a dashing thief called the Black Bandit (also played by Mr. Pace) and his outlaw band comprising a muscleman, a bomb-building Italian anarchist, the naturalist Charles Darwin, and a swami of sorts. In Alexandria's imagination, the characters are portrayed by various hospital orderlies and patients, and they've all embarked on a dangerous adventure to rescue the Black Bandit's true love from the evil Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone).

The idea is a clever inversion of the Scheherazade saga. The actor is not spinning fanciful tales in order to prolong his life, but to hasten his suicide. As soon as Alexandria can do him enough "favors," he's kaput — whether he finishes the story or not.

Ms. Untaru is almost frighteningly advanced for her years, with a vague kinship to the lonely child protagonists in films by other fabulists, such as Terry Gilliam. There's something genuine in her performance as she stammers through an English language that she hasn't quite learned yet. If some viewers find her overly precious, there's a quality here that can't be faked or art-directed. At least, it's effective in a way that nothing else in "The Fall" is, making you wish Mr. Singh had devised a stronger narrative for this remarkable character.