One of our foremost visual fabulists, Tarsem Singh hasn’t made a feature film in more than half a decade.
Indeed, since his last movie—2015’s sci-fi parable Self/Less, with Ryan Reynolds and Ben Kingsley—the director, known professionally as Tarsem, has been more acclaimed for his work in music videos and commercials. (Earlier this year, his superb Super Bowl spot for Toyota, filmed entirely in water, condensed the life story of Paralympian Jessica Long into 60 seconds of unreasonably stirring imagery.)
Meanwhile, Tarsem’s most staggering achievements in cinema increasingly run the risk of fading from memory, especially 2006’s The Fall, which has gone out of circulation and remains unavailable to rent or stream (at least legally, and in the U.S.; should neither of those caveats concern you, I highly suggest seeing it). Luck would have it that many consider The Fall to be Tarsem’s masterpiece; it starred Lee Pace as an injured stuntman recuperating in a L.A.-area hospital circa 1920. A reverse Scheherazade of sorts, he regaled a child with tales of fantastic adventure, ones increasingly colored by his own darkening headspace. As a film about storytelling and its subjective nature, The Fall gave Tarsem the freedom to indulge his fairy-tale-driven visual ingenuity in full, with results so sumptuously rich they boggled the senses.
“We see things that cannot exist, but our eyes do not lie,” Roger Ebert wrote of The Fall. Such is Tarsem’s power to convince us of the truth in what he shows us, regardless of its reality. Yet The Fall was not Tarsem’s sole triumph, and his following feature—2011’s Immortals—was perhaps even more undersung despite exemplifying the director’s substantive, singularly romantic style.
Arriving as the dust kicked up by 300’s chariots was still settling in Hollywood, this swords-and-sandals epic shared producers with Zack Snyder’s 2006 graphic novel adaptation and thus couldn’t sidestep the comparisons. Immortals, like 300, was orgiastic about its violence, with characters opening their enemies’ throats the way most of us open love letters, and Tarsem staged its retelling of Greek myth with the same creative liberty Snyder applied to Greek history.
Immortals loosely retells the Theseus myth: Henry Cavill stars as the mortal chosen by Zeus (Luke Evans, amusingly self-serious) to battle King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke, channeling late-career Brando to such a degree he delivers many of his lines while snacking). Long before the time of man, you see, generations of gods warred in the heavens. The younger Olympians proved victorious and came to reign over all of creation, while the defeated Titans were imprisoned beneath Mount Tartarus. Seeking revenge against the Olympians, Hyperion sets out to retrieve the Epirus Bow, a powerful weapon that would allow him to free the Titans. Standing his way is Theseus, who seeks revenge for the cruel slaying of his mother. Meanwhile, the gods consider intervening from on high, with Zeus maintaining that humanity must be left to fight its own battles.
Leading a blockbuster for the first time, Cavill was cast shortly before he won the coveted role of Superman in Snyder’s similarly revisionist Man of Steel, and he certainly supplies the greased abs and decorous charisma necessary to play a peasant on the precipice of heroism. His chemistry with the “virgin oracle” Phaedra (Freida Pinto), however obligatory, also generates surprising heat; that the pair go to bed at the first available opportunity feels like a couldn’t-resist beat from scribes Vlas and Charley Parlapanides, who write no other kind. Their screenplay is still the weakest element of the film, though its narrative generalities perhaps freed Tarsem up to innovate visually.
And that’s really the reason to watch Immortals. Tarsem was drawn to the idea of half-contemporizing Greek mythology by restaging it in the visual style of Renaissance paintings; he explained the aesthetic as “Caravaggio meets Fight Club,” a balance that makes more sense in practice than in theory. It’s certainly the case that Caravaggio’s naturalistic baroque style is palpable across Immortals, which emulates the painter’s dramatic contrasting of light and dark in battle sequences staged like religious tableaux: Immaculately composed, adorned with gradual eruptions of colorful gore, yet often partially obscured in thick, fluid shadow.
Immortals offers a panoply of imagery both vivid and nightmarish. Consider a sequence in which Theseus navigates an Escher-esque staircase littered with rose petals, entering a sepulchral, darkly glimmering shrine to do battle with a man in a horned barbed-wire mask. A savvy reworking of the hero’s famed battle with the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, it opts for challenging images over coherent ones, including that of two human eyes glaring out from behind a thicketed mess of metal spikes.
Tarsem cites Andrei Tarkovsky as a major influence on his expressive storytelling. Like the legendary Russian filmmaker, Tarsem has been conspicuously fascinated by tableaux vivant (French for “living pictures”) since his early years. Essentially filmed recreations of paintings, often with actors posed in evocative static compositions, tableaux vivant can be profoundly haunting and expressive. Tarsem’s feature debut, psychological horror The Cell, is awash in them, as a serial killer fills his hellish mindscape with perverse diorama in which he arranges agonized victims. (Only Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal has come close to catching the grotesque surrealism of such sequences.)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
