Possibly the most reassuring apocalyptic movie ever made, Greenaway's THE FALLS has at its narrative core a typical disaster plot but is in actual fact a remarkable and obsessive avant-garde work. A mysterious catastrophe (termed the Violent Unknown Event [VUE]) affects the Earth, causing widespread deformities and mutations, and the film is set in its aftermath as people try to come to terms with what happened. So far, so normal, but this is not even close to being a genre picture.
Most victims of other cinematic apocalypses become at best, hideously deformed mutants but more likely, zombies which our heroes will need to heroically but tragically battle against. Zombies, however, are not what Greenaway is interested in. Greenaway is interested in ornithology so his victims develop deformities which resemble the physiognomy of birds and are then plagued with desires of flight. Rather than the Earth descending into a wasteland where daily survival often means a fight to the death, the world, in a highly British spirit of 'Keep calm and carry on', just keeps on revolving in much the same way as it did before. Albeit one where people keep on throwing themselves off of tower blocks, attempting to fly.
The form THE FALLS takes is possibly best described as a visual encyclopedia. It is a record of the 92 VUE victims whose surname begins with the letters Fall-, and proceeds alphabetically from one person to the next providing a short biography of each. Although encyclopedic in design, Greenaway takes great delight in emphasising the subjectivity of it all. Biographies will disagree with each other over how events happened, the VUE Commission will announce that certain biographies will not be released as they "not to be trusted", who even qualifies as a VUE "victim" is up for debate, and even where it happened. THE FALLS is an encyclopedia at peace with humanity's inability to come to a conclusive agreement about anything.
What appears to be the central contradiction of Greenaway is that on the one hand he is a fastidious cataloguer: the biographies are detailed with an eye for the minutiaie, ideas developed in one biography will be examined in another from a different perspective, contradicted or reinforced. Yet on the other hand he is a complete absurdist from the Monty Python school of comedy, only far far drier. His world is precise (although always aware of the subjectivity of 'facts') and clearly created with a great deal of thought and deliberation, and yet his world is also one where there is the distinct possibility that an apocalypse was caused by a conspiracy of birds who were fed up with not being treated quite right. It is a contradiction that will either drive you to distraction or delight you in a way that no other director can. Running at over 3 hours long it is not to be lightly recommended and his earlier shorts like H IS FOR HOUSE and DEAR PHONE possibly achieve more in considerably less time but for Greenaway's early, ritualised and highly compulsive work THE FALLS stands as a welcome, if unwieldy, climax.
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