Lee Pace imagines himself as The Masked Bandit with young Catinca Untaru as his compatriot in The Fall.

Roadside Attractions

The Fall, a wacky fairy tale for grown-ups, is as stunning in its beauty as it is in its lack of logic.

Indian writer-director Tarsem Singh, who just goes by the name Tarsem, knows how to create some sumptuous visuals, as he did with his similarly gorgeous but pretentious 2000 thriller The Cell, starring Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D’Onofrio. He has quite an imagination, all right, as you would imagine from a commercial and music-video veteran. (Tarsem’s best known work is still the clip for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” and that was back in 1991.) You just wonder where he’s going with it.

Too often the images, shot over several years in countries including Bali, Fiji, South Africa and Italy, seem to exist because they’re cool-looking and weird, and for no other reason.

The convoluted story, which Tarsem co-scripted with Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis, follows the friendship that forms between an injured stuntman (Lee Pace) and a little girl with a broken collarbone (Romanian newcomer Catinca Untaru). Both are stuck in a hospital in 1920s Los Angeles.

Every day, Untaru’s cherubic Alexandria visits Pace’s bedridden Roy and hears pieces of an increasingly wild tale, the details of which he draws from his own life. The pretty nurse becomes a princess, the leading man who stole Roy’s girlfriend becomes the villain and little Alexandria, who lost her own father, becomes Roy’s daughter — sometimes. Again, that would require consistency.

Roy hopes that by charming the girl, he can talk her into stealing enough morphine so that he can kill himself. See, we warned you this wasn’t meant for kids.

Pace, the Golden Globe-nominated star of ABC’s Pushing Daisies, would seem to have the right charismatic presence for the job, but it’s sometimes tough to tell under the elaborate costumes and fantasies his character has concocted.

Tarsem takes us underwater to swim with an elephant in slow motion; to a butterfly-shaped island in the middle of an aquamarine sea; to sun-baked, dark-orange sand dunes; to a hilltop palace surrounded by buildings that are only painted cobalt blue.

Individually, these are all striking shots that’ll make your jaw drop. As part of Roy’s story, in which he plays a masked bandit among a motley posse of men trying to take out the evil Governor Odious, they feel arbitrary and often just plain silly. One of the men on his team is Charles Darwin; another is a freed slave who, in real life, is the guy who delivers ice to the hospital. The shades of The Wizard of Oz, with its blending of fantasy and reality, are pretty hard to avoid, as are the comparisons to Time Bandits, which had a similar storytelling structure.

That would make Untaru our Dorothy figure (and our Fred Savage, if you will). With her pigtails, chubby cheeks, turned-up nose and inquisitive delivery, she’s almost too cute for words. (Now 11 years old, she didn’t even know English when she was cast in the role.) But Pace’s low-key, down-home demeanor balances her out nicely.

The moments they share together chatting and teasing each other have an easy, father-daughter sweetness to them. They’re more enjoyable, and make The Fall more watchable, than Tarsem’s many self-satisfied flights of fancy.

** 1/2The Fall

Starring: Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru.

Rated: R, contains violent images.

Fall director went after a vanishing world, sans digital effects1

Tarsem — formerly known as Tarsem Singh — envisioned The Fall as a “swan song for old-fashioned filmmaking.”

Roadside attractions

Tarsem — the filmmaker formerly known as Tarsem Singh — has done “the digital thing” before. He’s made a movie (The Cell) and music videos that used the latest technical trickery to show us things we haven’t seen before.

But for The Fall, his adult fairy tale, he wanted to go old school. He wanted to show us the amazing things he’s seen in his travels but that no one has filmed before.

“I thought I would make a swan song for this sort of old-fashioned filmmaking,” Tarsem says in the lilting, musical accent of his native India. “I wanted this to be a heightened reality, but still real. So I thought ‘Why not make the last film of this style, with real settings that filmgoers have never seen before?’ The last piece of real eye candy.”

For The Fall, essentially a wild adventure tale a movie stuntman invents for a 5-year-old girl while both are recovering in a 1920s Los Angeles hospital, Tarsem went to 24 countries, from the Nicobar Islands to Namibia.

He had memories of an old Russian film where an injured man tells a boy a fantastical pirate tale while both are in a hospital (Yo Ho Ho, 1981). Tarsem abandoned that story and made one closer to his own experience. No pirates, plenty of exotic Far Eastern locales.

“Everything in this movie is real. The ‘Blue City’ is a real blue city (Jodhpur) in India. You are legally not allowed to change the color of your house. Legally, to live there, your house must be blue. But we could go round and tell people there, for two months you could have all the free blue paint you want, to get them to put fresh paint on their houses. So it was that much more vivid.

“Digitally, all we did was remove telephone wires and TV antennas and lamp posts, and those are things nobody misses.

“These places exist, these countries, this part of India, that island chain, that corner of Africa. The reason you haven’t seen them before is they’re so hard to get to, they don’t have facilities to allow you to make the movie there. ‘Where is the parking lot? Where is the catering? Where can we stay while we’re there on location?’ ”

He searched the world for a child who could convey the innocence of a little girl who has never seen a movie, whose imagination is shaped by her limited life experiences. He found Catinca Untaru in Romania. He tried telling the story without the wild costumes, the exotic characters, all invented by an American stuntman and imagined by a little Romanian girl who hears his tale. But he couldn’t.

“This thing is bulky and exotic and this world of cinema shot like this is dying and will go entirely to the computer very soon. So I will make this document, this artifact that people will watch 20 or 30 years from now and stare in wonder at these places, which will be gone by then.”

The filmmaker accomplished what he set out to do, putting on film some of the most stunning locations ever. He’s not sweating the bad reviews, which describe The Fall as “a bedtime story impeccably designed to flatter its own maker” (Slant Magazine) and Tarsem as the movie’s “wildly indulged creator” (Variety).

“This is a very polarizing movie,” Tarsem says with a laugh. “I didn’t set out to do that. I just wanted to make a film which used these incredible locations to tell a story of a man who wants to manipulate a child by telling her a story, a story he changes to suit what his audience is telling him she likes or does not like.

“But you know, the people who get this, who really want to see something they haven’t seen before, they are going to love what they see. The girl is amazing. The visuals, all stunning and all real. I hope I’ve made a movie that really takes people out of themselves and out into the world, because the magic is still out there. It’s just that no one had taken a film crew to film it, until now.”