After finishing up the Wong Kar Wai trilogy, I didn’t think I’d enjoy this film as much, but I was wrong. This film is really amazing and truly a masterpiece. The costumes, the landscapes. The colors, it’s really almost a perfect film.

It also stars Lee Pace who does an amazing job in a tv series – Foundation, where he plays Day, one of the three clones of Cleon that rules the Empire along with his brothers Dusk and Dawn.

The story is basically about a pain pill addicted stunt man who winds up in a hospital where he is befriended by a little girl who has fallen out of an orange tree. He entertains her with a story about a group of bandits who have taken a blood oath to avenge two brothers, one life lost, a lover, and a butterfly by killing the evil Governor Odious, who is responsible for destroying each of their lives.

What’s unusual about the film is it brings the audience into the story as it’s narrated by Roy and Alexandria. What’s even more interesting is that they shot the film together in stages. Most of the story was improvised by Pace, while the actress that played Alexandria was a 6 year old little girl who didn’t really speak English. She doesn’t seem to be acting, but is quite natural and it’s in part because she wasn’t strictly scripted and they left a lot of her ad libs and the language barrier actually impacts the story.

They then spent 4 years shooting the story scenes of the film all around the world. Tarsem, the director, financed the film by taking jobs in cities he wanted to shoot in, and then flew the actors out for filming the commercial, while he worked with them to film the scenes for the film in their off hours.

The film isn’t just visually stunning, but emotionally it just lands. The characters both have a lot of emotional pain but one represents nihilistic hopelessness and the other represents uninhibited hope and innocence and the way everything unfolds draws the viewer into not just the story but also the story within a story.

Unlike 2046, which I reviewed earlier, Tarsem doesn’t disorient the viewer, instead he keeps the viewer anchored in the story within the story by having Roy and Alexandria narrate it. He doesn’t use unusually close lenses to isolate the viewer or mask the background. He doesn’t use dim lighting to draw your focus to the characters only. In fact it’s somewhat reversed – Tarsem wants you to focus on the story and ignore the two main characters. The friendship between Roy and Alexandria is basically a sleeper wave that you don’t pay attention to until it suddenly sweeps over you.

I rate this film 9/10. It has an R rating but there really isn’t a reason in my opinion except for some scary scenes at the end that take place within the story, they are violent and a little upsetting because Alexandria is present but it’s not realistic violence or overly horrifying, it’s more stylized. There is also some pain pill abuse and suicide plays a role in the film, but nothing too over the top. I can’t recall more than 1 mild swear and no sex or nudity.