The Fall is an amazing and scarcely flawed film: a monument to the pleasure of having eyeballs (for "the visible" as John Berger would say, but more for the phenomenon of vision than for just things that are visible) and a paean to the act of storytelling.

The film unravels as a story told by a man in a hospital bed, mid-1920s L.A.—orange groves and that—to an unusual girl housed in the same hospital. The rapport between the two is comfortable and spontaneous—you realize it can't have been scripted quite like this. They go back and forth saying sensible nonsense: "What?" "What??" and misunderstanding each other; it can only be a document of two people reading each others' faces. This turns out to be the case: the girl (age six) was cast as a non-actor, someone the director, Tarsem, had (from oodles of footage shot at schools around the world) recognized could improvise, who did not know English when they began, confronting the other actor, an unknown called Lee Pace, on the set while shooting.

Tarsem (Singh) had fallen out of my consciousness as the director of the noteworthy Deep Forest video, "Sweet Lullaby" and the R.E.M. video, "Losing My Religion," both remarkable pieces of work in the desert of music videos; now he's back. In public, he first comes off like an excited but slack Californian, albeit with an Indian accent. Asked to talk about his film, he unspools a diarrhea of rambling explanation, but it soon becomes apparent he knows his junk backward. He's full of sharp references to the history of cinema and attuned to the necessity of telling stories visually. Most of his career has been spent on commercial shoots, but he could be mistaken for a slightly mad film professor. Answering a question about the music of The Fall, he starts off on the difference between the hospital and the location shoots, and you're sure he's blowing off the question. Five minutes in, he begins wrapping up by saying that the theme of Beethoven's 7th was chosen after the hospital shoots and before the locations, that it was one of the anchors that guided those shoots and the editing. He must have a mental conversation stack four or five points deep.

Most insightful of all was his description of the film's impetus. He recalled a school he attended "in the Himalayas" where the teacher would tell captivating stories, feeding off the kids' expressions and reactions, continually working them into the story. Here's a man who, throughout a career of commercial film directing, has kept a fascination with the elemental flame of spontaneous storytelling, and the communion between teller and audience that kindles it.