Tarsem Singh’s indulgent epic, produced by Spike Jonze and David Fincher, was little seen on its original release in 2006, and now gets a rerelease in a 4K restoration on the Mubi streaming platform. It’s certainly worth noticing, with its Gilliamesque surrealism, and its setting in Rajasthan, north-western India, offers wonderful landscapes. Its beguiling set pieces feature Justine Waddell playing some deadpan comedy as a gloriously costumed princess – although I have to admit that in general the film’s rather placid, stately, fantasy style can be exasperatingly inert.
The scene is Los Angeles in the early years of silent pictures; Lee Pace plays Roy, a stuntman who is now seriously, perhaps permanently, injured. He is laid up in hospital and deeply depressed after a dangerous fall filming a movie whose lead actress was once his girlfriend, but has now left him for the vapid male star. Roy is befriended by a little Romanian girl from the neighbouring children’s ward; this is Alexandria (played by Catinca Untaru, whose English dialogue is sometimes a little indistinct). Kindly, Roy offers to tell the wide-eyed Alexandria an epic story of adventure featuring five heroes battling a hateful governor, and the story comes to life before our eyes with Roy and Alexandria appearing in it and some whimsical muddling up of Indians and Native Americans.
But Roy has an ulterior motive with this Scheherazade-type storytelling; he wants to take Alexandria into his confidence so that she will steal a bottle of morphine for him, perhaps so that he can take his own life. Waddell plays a nurse who appears to be having an affair with a doctor, and she appears in the story as the princess who is engaged to be married to the warriors’ enemy, but falls for Roy. There are some startling images and the film has a distinct, odd flavour of its own.