The Fall by Tarsem Singh: Film Analysis

The film I have chosen to analyse is The Fall. The Fall was written and directed by a man named Tarsem Singh and was released in June 2008 in just nine screens in the USA. The film is an adventure fantasy set in Los Angeles in the 1920’s, a young immigrant girl finds herself in a hospital recovering from a fall. An unlikely friendship rises between her and a bedridden stuntman who captivates and takes her on a whimsical story that takes them away from the lethargies of the hospital into a cinematic spectacle of their joint imaginations. He uses her naivety as a selfish tool as her only hope is to finish the tale.
I have chosen a scene which is 40 minutes into the film where the tale is rapidly unwinding. There are five men on a hunt to find the evil Odious and have found themselves lost in a beautiful desert and here they uncover their essential directions. The setting is a vast desert with nothing in sight apart from the many dunes that appear neverending, the men appear insignificant to their surroundings as the establishing shot is a wide angle of three of the men quite a distance away from each other. Walt Purdy, a man dressed in a extravagant yellow coat is mounted on his horse on the right, whilst Darwin and the mystic are at the back of the shot on the left. These positions of the characters symbolise their current situation, lost and alone in the vast wilderness by creating a sense of unimportance in comparison with the expanse of the desert. A close up of Walt Purdy reveals their nerves as he chews on the end of his cigar as he knows it is his last one. This prop is a key to understanding their prediciment, as we can take from this how their supplies are running out.
Lighting and colour is important in this scene as we see the light adapting to the mood of the men. The scene starts with high-key lighting representing that until something bad occurs nothing can harm them, but alas the mystic eats the map which is poisenous and runs to a hidden grass