By Josh Hughes
Throughout fall quarter, Western Reads has put on a series of movie events entitled “Diversity & Diverse Voices In The American Cultural Landscape”, and the culminating event will take place on November 29 from 6:00-9:00 p.m. in Bond Hall 105. Tares Singh’s “The Fall”, a surreal fantasy movie, will be the movie being shown, and admission is free and open to the public.
This year’s Western Reads book “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which is written as a letter from Coates to his son, addresses the pervading sense of racism that has haunted both his and his son’s generations, and it functions as a powerhouse of culture and diversity. While the movies for the diversity series do not directly correlate with Coates’ book, they try to tie in elements and motifs from his novel and the overarching yearlong theme of diversity.
“The Fall” is no exception; the film centers on five fictional characters that range in culture much more than a stereotypical adventure film. Set in a hospital, a gravely injured stuntman, played by Lee Pace, befriends a young girl who has just broken her arm, and he starts to tell her stories so that she’ll sneak him morphine. The stuntman’s tale revolves around these five characters, which consist of an Indian warrior, a black ex-slave, and Italian explosives expert, Charles Darwin, and a masked bandit.
The film encompasses ideas about companionship, love, loss, and failure, but the diversity included in the picture resonates through the entire runtime. A visually dazzling movie with very few contemporary influences, “The Fall” takes the viewer down a rabbit hole of a bedtime story, remaining self aware within its double narrative. Taking place in an ambiguous, imaginary time in America, the stuntman depicts a vivid tale that journeys across the globe and revels in the power of cross-cultural storytelling.
Filmed in South Africa, India, the Czech Republic and Italy, among other locations, the movie takes twists and turns in the blink of an eye that give the film a nearly dreamlike quality. The fictional characters in the stuntman’s tale don’t act so much as caricatures as they do abstract, surreal visions of their respective characters. This adds depth to the sense of diversity and inclusivity that Singh paints in his film. Alexandria, the young girl, is also Romanian born, and it seems like a necessary balance to Pace’s young American man.
Already a decade old, there’s still a strong relevance to Singh’s film and the way he seamlessly blends cultures and backgrounds into a mildly twisted fairy tale. It’s refreshing to see him rely on so few tropes that usually make their way into both adventure movies and children’s stories, and the film will serve as an apt ending to the movie series.
Be sure to look out for further events this year from Western Reads, and learn more about Coates book and the goals for the year on their website at https://wp.wwu.edu/westernreads/