The last full day of Ebertfest started off early with an 11AM screening of The Fall, directed by Tarsem. Tarsem also directed The Cell, which played here at last year’s fest. I’d never seen The Fall, and I’m glad that I caught it here on the huge screen at the Virginia Theater, because this is a film that begs to be seen in a theater.
The Fall tells a story of a friendship of sorts between an injured stuntman and a young girl who are in the same hospital together in the 1920s. The stuntman, Roy (Lee Pace) passes time by telling an epic fairy tale of sorts to the girl, Alexandria (young Romanian actress Catinca Untaru, who was just seven when the film was made); Roy provides the story, while Alexandria imagines the visuals in her vivid imagination, creating the characters from the people she knows at the hospital. The rub is that the crippled Roy is telling Alexandria the story as a means to persuade her to steal morphine pills from the dispensary for him so he can commit suicide.

I liked the narrative of the film very much, despite some minor issues with flow and pacing, and the acting, particularly by Untaru and Pace, is great, but like The Cell, what made this film for me is the unique way in which Tarsem brings the artistic vision in his mind to life on the screen. The Fall is a stunning visual poem of a film and, as Roger Ebert said in his review of the film, whether you find it overly indulgent or not, it should be seen simply because it exists. In a weird sort of way, Tarsem’s films remind me of Guy Maddin’s, in that they’re both brilliantly creative artists who find a way to pull the sometimes crazy images out of their minds and convey them on the screen, and their films are both haunting and very strong visually.
Next up on the slate was Sita Sings the Blues, which is one of the most distinct and innovative films I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. Animator Nina Paley tells the epic Hindu tale of Ramayana in a variety of animation styles through the jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw — quite an interesting use of music from one time and place to tell a story from another, very different one. Throughout the film, three shadow puppet characters pop up to commentate on the tale as it unfolds.
The other thing that makes the film compelling is that Paley, an copyright/creative freedom activist, has chosen to allow her audience to freely distribute the film however they like by releasing it under a Creative Commons license. You can freely download the film on her website in a variety of formats and watch and distribute it however you like; Paley, in the post-screening Q&A, talked at length about her decision to make the film freely available and how, in her own experience, making her work available for audience distribution has actually heightened interest in the film generally, and she feels that even after seeing the film at home, people still want to see it when it plays at theaters. She’s a fascinating, intelligent, and sometimes surprising woman, and it was great to see such a film featured at this fest.
Unfortunately, I missed the screening of Nothing But the Truth, though I did make it to part of the Q&A with director Rod Lurie and actor Matt Dillon afterwards (best question: “Where is Matt staying while he’s here?”). The day’s film screenings wrapped up with Let the Right One In, which I’d only seen on screener at home prior to this. Seeing that film at a theater made me appreciate all the more the subtler nuances of the film and reminded me of why I liked it so much.
The lively and entertaining Q&A following the film, moderated by The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips, with the film’s producer, Carl Molinder and efilmcritic.com’s Erik Childress and Peter Sobczynski participating, touched on everything from how they got the blood-sucking sound effects (answer: sausages and yogurt) and whether the voice of actress Lina Leandersson was dubbed over (answer: yes, because they felt the voice of the character, Eli, needed to sound older). There was also some interesting talk about how the film was received in Sweden, where vampire stories are apparently not as ingrained into popular culture as they are here.
An American remake is in the works; Molinder said in the Q&A that he believes that Matt Reeves (Cloverfield), who’s set to direct the film, will go back to the source material, the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, in working up the remake version, and that it may possibly include material from the novel that was not included in the original Swedish version. It will be interesting to see whether the remake keeps in the material about Eli’s companion and caregiver being a pedophile and some of the other back story that was left out.
One thing I learned at the Q&A that I didn’t know about the film is that the novel on which it was based was, in part, autobiographical; the storyline that involves Oskar being bullied and some the details around his home life and parents came from the author’s own boyhood. The vampire part, presumably, is not taken from life. The other thing I learned from the Q&A is that Michael Phillips does great sound effects, in particular in mimicking the sounds of vampires sucking blood. Who knew?

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