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Here's some good news: "The Fall" is back. After an 18-year hibernation, director Tarsem Singh's glorious cult fantasy is being given a brief theatrical run (in a 4K restoration) and is also, for the first time, streaming, too (on MUBI). For anyone who's never seen the film, this is an opportunity worth seizing.

The lore surrounding "The Fall" is part of its fascination. By the time he began working on the picture, Tarsem was well known as the director of both the music video for REM's 1991 hit "Losing My Religion" and an intense sci-fi movie called "The Cell." He was also a much-in-demand advertising pro who'd grown wealthy shooting high-end commercials for deep-pocketed companies like Nike, Levi's, and Coca-Cola. This main gig required much flying around the world in search of exotic locations, travels the director eventually decided to put to dual use as location scouting for a feature film -- one that he would finance with his own money. Utilizing the screenplay for a 1981 Bulgarian movie called "Yo ho ho" as a model, Tarsem's picture, set in 1915, told the story of a Hollywood stuntman named Roy Walker (Lee Pace, later of "Foundation" and "Halt and Catch Fire"), who has been partially paralyzed in a bad fall (the parts of the movie that we see echo Buster Keaton's silent classic "The General"). Recovering in a Los Angeles hospital, Roy grows despondent and begins to contemplate suicide. Then he meets another patient, a little Romanian girl named Alexandria (six-year-old non-English-speaking non-actor Catinca Untaru, a complete sweetie). Alexandria, who has a broken arm, sympathizes with Roy and he agrees to her request that he make up an exciting story to entertain her.

Roy's story is a swashbuckling tale about five men on a mission to terminate a bad guy called Governor Odious. As Roy relates this story to Alexandria, we see the characters as she sees them in her imagination, where they're played by other characters we've already met. There's the masked Black Bandit (Pace), a formidable Indian warrior (Jeetu Verma), an escaped slave (Marcus Wesley), an Italian explosives expert (Robin Smith), and, for obscure reasons, the naturalist Charles Darwin (Leo Bill). The vile Odious is played by an oily bounder named Sinclair (Daniel Caltagirone), who happens to be the man who stole Roy's girlfriend.

The story is lushly romantic and has a solid, burnished Old Hollywood look. The world that Tarsem has built up around it, however, created over the course of four years and shot in 28 countries, is a work of spectacular fantasy. He takes us to vast desert dunes in Namibia, a tiny island in Bali, a reef in Fiji (for an underwater rendezvous with a swimming elephant), and to the director's native India to see the Blue City of Jodhpur. (Tarsem wanted some municipal touchups and he paid for the new blue paint to make them.) As the story evolves, with the introduction of, among many other things, a small army of assassins in gleaming black-leather armor, we find ourselves being whisked from Kashmir to Buenos Aires to Rome and Paris and Istanbul (for a few moments at the sublime Hagia Sophia).

Tarsem's commitment to his story keeps the movie from devolving into travelogue, even as it passes near such gotta-see tourist magnets as Hadrian's Villa and the Taj Mahal. The movie is really about the magic of storytelling and the making of movies themselves. (At the end, there's a tribute montage of wild stunts from old silent pictures.) There have been respectful grumblings about "The Fall" over the years -- especially about how far its ending is from the place where it really should end. True enough -- the movie does sprawl a bit. But it also has a flow that's worth going with.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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