Contrary to the opening line of Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979), Roy (Lee Pace), the hospital-bound stuntman main character of The Fall (2006), tells a story in order to die. Depressed at the state of his life — he might be permanently paralyzed after a train set piece during a recent shoot went wrong, and his girlfriend has left him for the actor he was doubling for — he’s intent on killing himself with a morphine overdose. He figures his best bet is to convince a 5-year-old with probing green eyes named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) to sneak around for him and find him a bottle-full. She, too, is spending a lot of time at the hospital (she has a broken arm) and warms up to Roy as he entertains her with a fantastical story he improvises that wouldn’t feel out of place in One Thousand and One Nights. 

It’s a winding journey through a series of exotic locales — most of them ornate real-life places that in The Fall’s purview are lent new otherworldliness — taken by a quintet of men flashily costumed by Eiko Ishioka who have little in common except for their wanting to take down the dastardly Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone). The Fall’s story-within-its-story is fun, its tableaux painterly on account of co-writer and director Tarsem Singh’s sedulous staging and given a surplus of color by Ishioka’s ravishing design work. There are many pieces I’ll continue thinking about. Pace’s gold-filigreed, black matador vest with tumid pants to match. An ivory-white antler-shaped headdress festooned with gold flowers and jeweled beads. But none will linger as much as the oversized black, red, and white fur coat the film’s fictionalized version of Charles Darwin wears that suggests a butterfly certain to poison if ingested.

Watching The Fall, I was glad that Singh and Ishioka, who have collaborated on nearly all of the former’s movies, found each other. In Singh’s style-forward milieus, obviously refined by the music-video and commercial career with which he cut his teeth, the faintly ominous but no less beautiful ostentatiousness of Ishioka’s instantly recognizable flair never found a better cinematic home.

From The Fall.

Recently reheralded as a visual masterpiece after some acclaim at the time of its release — the movie is now available to watch on MUBI after years of unavailability following its nonevent of a theatrical run — The Fall nonetheless might be more of a success when it takes place in its comparatively soberly shot present. (Which is all the way back in 1915, in a particularly arid part of California.) Many of the film’s detractors decry the movie as a style-over-substance case study. But in the no-frills scenes where Untaru and a cherub-cheeked Pace are simply interacting, amusing each other with the anything-goes possibilities of storytelling, the movie is too moving to seem barren of heart or depth. It’s in those moments, not as much the show-stopping, fantasy-steeped ones Singh and his collaborators have meticulously worked to create, that The Fall is at its best.

Singh is gifted at directing children. He gets none of the precocious mugging commonly seen in child actors from Untaru: she really does seem like a 5-year-old who walked on to set one day and was spontaneously asked to star in this movie. With most of their conversations improvised and captured with cleverly placed rather than out-in-the-open cameras, Pace and Untaru create a touching rapport that’s among the better representations in a movie I’ve seen of an adult interacting with a child. There’s much mutual confusion and inevitable distraction, but a real emotional bond forms with enough time. It becomes particularly poignant toward the film’s end, when Roy, guilt-ridden by some inadvertent harm he’s caused his young friend, starts introducing angst into the story that his increasingly upset hospital-mate would prefer not to hear. Her emotional reaction helps to start lifting up a character who’s been understandably moping over his objectively awful situation all film long. 

Roy tells his story in order to die. But The Fall, ultimately not a defeatist movie, eventually gets to a place where its implicit sentiment will line up with Didion’s, only Singh’s tone is more jubilant than Didion’s slicing skepticism. Singh’s own narrative methods might be slightly too fussy for the movie to be as emotionally potent of an ode to storytelling as he’d like it to be. But he directs with such imaginative élan that you’re happy to watch this movie that is, maybe more than anything, an ode to the stylishness with which you can tell a story, the imaginative places it can go not in plot but in look and feeling. One is used to being eager for what a good movie will tell you next. The Fall makes you just as, sometimes more, eager for what will be shown.