Philadelphia Weekly

The Fall
Directed by Tarsem
B
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., May 30

Filmed by a famed music video and commercial director in more than a dozen of the world's most picturesque locales and featuring characters with names like the Bandit and the Mystic--how isn't The Fall the most pretentious thing ever?

Mono-named Tarsem, last seen with the striking but stupid The Cell, opens his self-financed pet project in the plastic grays of an Ingmar Bergman-influenced perfume ad. Improbably, that's a bit of misdirection, as The Fall quickly reveals itself to be playful and jaunty, not merely a collection of images to frame above the fireplace. It's that too, of course, but our visualist has devised a rather ingenious way of getting us from one arresting sight to the next.

Set, pointedly, in silent-era Hollywood, The Fall finds an injured movie stuntman (Lee Pace), for reasons that eventually become clear, trying to keep the attention of a cute little girl (Catinca Untaru). How? By pulling an epic directly from his posterior, one concerning the vengeful quest taken by an assortment of badasses. These include a former slave rocking a helmet with giant horns, a dreadlocked feral type who emerges from a tree, and Charles Darwin himself, clad in a pimp's fur coat and aided by his pet monkey.

The last bit ought to tip you off to The Fall's delicate tone, which downplays any potential self- seriousness with a puckish sense of humor. (In one scene Pace whimsically changes a character's nationality thrice.) Tarsem's m.o. is twofold. One: He seeks to deconstruct the art of storytelling, paying extra attention to the bizarre fact that cinema--an elastic and versatile medium--is largely devoted to the mere spinning of yarns. While Untaru is bewitched by words, we're given the added bonus of searing visuals, captured in the likes of Fiji and Argentina, to keep us in our seats.

Which brings us to two: Tarsem wants to show how nuts it is to invent worlds on computers when our very planet is teeming with great shit, just waiting to be lensed. And so we see white sand dwarfed by brown mountains, a city of blue-painted buildings, a sea of stairs right out of M.C. Escher, swimming elephants and on and on.

Tarsem doesn't remotely have the fevered imagination of Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo), and he hammers his points too hard in the final stretch. But there was little reason to expect a film with this setup to be thoughtful, much less sturdy.

France has a habit of stealing and repackaging other nations' ideas, as the French New Wave and Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita) will attest. But give them some credit: At least they did Bond first.

In 1949, three years before Ian Fleming created 007, prolific author Jean Bruce birthed Agent 117, codename for secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, who scuttled about the planet in no fewer than 91 (!) novels. Following the success of the Dr. No movie--plus the auto-related death of Bruce one year before Fleming's own 1964 demise--French producers kickstarted their own film series, with seven po-faced 117 romps that, while homegrown hits, never quite made the international splash of the Flemings.

That said, you don't need to know any of this to get something out of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, a parody of the Bruce films. After all, it fits snugly into the long, long tradition of spy movie lampoons, which stretches way past Austin Powers into the '60s with Modesty Blaise, Casino Royale (the bad one, that is) and the James Coburn-starring Flint romps--even to Dr. No itself, if you will.

Part ZAZ-style parody, part Down With Love-esque loving imitation, OSS 117 sends our haughty, chauvinistic secret agent man (comedian Jean Dujardin, perfectly plastic) to Cairo to "make the Middle East safe." More to the point, he's shipped there so the filmmakers can mock Western relations to that part of the globe circa 1955, plus whatever similarities to today's sociopolitical climate just happen to crop up. (Hint: a lot.)

OSS 117 expends a lot of energy mimicking the overheated but stale aesthetics of '60s Eurospy filmmaking, from matte paintings to rear projection to flat CinemaScope camera setups. But it spends at least as much parodying Western arrogance and cultural insensitivity. Upon arriving in Cairo Dujardin wastes little time in hitting on the Muslim babes and telling a muezzin to shut the fuck up. Later he blithely informs a local, through his custom zillion-watt smile, "Yours is a strange religion. You'll grow tired of it."

Honestly this is the stuff of sketch comedy length, and if OSS 117 doesn't quite have the jokes to sustain feature length, it sports a laid-back, low-watt vibe that's more pleasant than half the Bond series. And hey, at least Mike Myers is nowhere in sight.

Not Reviewed

Ongoing

Alexandra
Director Alexander Sokurov has stated he steadfastly believes, war or no, Russia should hold onto Chechnya, which is the subject of his antiwar film Alexandra. This conservative stance--though tempered by a respect for the Chechen culture and its livelihood--sneaks into a couple of dialogue exchanges, but it's superseded by his belief in the horror and mundanity of all wars. B- (M.P.)