The Falling Star Review: Silent Comedy Throwback

The Falling Star looks back to silent comedy for a vibrant and cartoonish tale of murder attempts and mistaken identity.

Rather than attempt to update the vaudeville style of humor for a modern age, Abel and Gordon work in conversation with it, unashamedly embracing every pratfall and misunderstanding. 

The plot of The Falling Star is ostensibly a parody of film noir, but really it is a rack on which to hang comic bits and gags. I would suggest not trying to follow the plot too closely, because it’s rather ridiculously convoluted, and, frankly, it’s not that important. The jokes are what is important in this particular movie. Abel stars as Boris, a bartender at The Falling Star bar and a former political radical. One quiet night, a crazed man (Bruno Romy) shows up at the bar and attempts to shoot Boris with a pistol in retaliation for a bombing perpetrated by Boris in his radical days. Unfortunately, the arm that the man uses to shoot is mechanical and difficult to control. Things go comically awry.

This is the first of three times throughout the movie that the mechanically armed man will ineptly attempt to shoot Boris. The bartender’s cunning business partners, Kayoko (Kaori Ito) and Tim (Philippe Mortz) decide that he needs to disappear. The perfect escape plan emerges when they spot a look-alike on the street, the melancholy recluse Dom, also played by Abel. The plan for Boris and Dom to switch plans is complicated, however, by the fact that Dom’s estranged wife, Fiona (Gordon), a bird-like woman with a build like Olive Oyl, is a private detective. 

Much of the action in the movie takes place around The Falling Star bar. The audience becomes so familiar with the vividly colored walls and the spare decorations that the space becomes, in the words of that old cliché, “like a character in the movie.” The styling of the sets recall the look of movies by Aki Kaurismäki. They’re shown to great advantage by the painterly cinematography from Pascale Marin. The dollhouse-like interiors, theatrical performances from the actors, and blatant use of rear projection during driving sequences give The Falling Star a heightened, fantastical quality. It takes place in a world far away from our own. This removal from reality allows the very particular comic sensibility of Abel and Gordon to flourish. It logically follows that a world in which bars have teal walls would also have private detectives with a bean bag chair in their office and people that don’t pay enough attention to whose hair they are brushing. 

For all intents and purposes, The Falling Star is a silent film. The little dialogue that is in the movie is superfluous, a decorative garnish. There are very few verbal jokes throughout the runtime. The gags arise out of the characters body language, such as Abel’s mime-like control over his limbs, or the way that they interact with their surroundings, such as Fiona and Dom repeatedly passing by one another but not noticing. Not every joke lands, several are rather obvious, but all are carried off with an undeniable skill. 

As there are so few recent movies with the style and tone of the film. I worry that general audiences may not know how to read this movie. The visual based humor that Abel and Gordon employ has been relegated to children’s media over the past decades. Yet, even those audience members who do not respond to the movie’s humor will not be able to deny the commitment and talent with which it is deployed. With its Francophone attitude, cheerful colors, and cartoonish bits of physical humor, The Falling Star proudly stands alone. 

The Falling Star will open at the Quad Cinema in New York on August 30, 2024, and at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles and in select US theaters on September 13.