Europeans; and the actor’s pain, which inspires the seafaring story (he wants to engage the boy so the boy will perform a dangerous favor), also affects the story, in which the actor is inclined to kill off his characters, whom the boy has grown fond of. Despite what he identifies as flaws in cinematography and acting, the writer Branislav Slantchev considers Yo Ho Ho one of the better Bulgarian films of its time. (One wonders what both the boy in the film and Slantchev would make of Johnny Depp’s record-breaking movies about pirates.) Yo Ho Ho, written by Valeri Petrov and starring Kiril Variyski as the actor and the lead pirate and Victor Chuchkov as the boy, is a film seen decades ago by the director Tarsem Singh, who made the beautiful, unique, and controversial film The Cell. (While “The Cell came and went at the box-office, it has since amassed a cult following for its Dali disturbances and hideous theatrics,” wrote Ben Barna of BlackBook magazine, online April 27, 2008). The India-born Tarsem, who might be said to live in airplanes, acquired the rights to make a work based on Yo Ho Ho: a project he kept alive in his mind for more than twenty years, and which took about four years to make: an early edit of The Fall, based on Yo Ho Ho, was completed in 2006 and shown at a film festival, the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, but the final film did not appear in theaters until 2008, presented by the film directors David Fincher and Spike Jonze, who like Tarsem made a name in video production before doing films. The moving picture The Fall, directed by the much-traveled Tarsem, is a beautiful, unique film—and also controversial.

For me, the film is first about the relationship between two people, an American silent film stuntman and a young Romanian girl: in a California hospital, he is depressed by the accident that has paralyzed him and the broken relationship with the woman he loves, and she is recovering from an arm broken while workin