Tale of Tales - Reviews
Tale of Tales Review – Bawdy and Fantastical
The adult fairytale is a freakish, hybrid, disturbing creature, mostly forgotten in these days of Disney sanitisation, but Tale of Tales resurrects the genre with surreal humour and gothic horror. There are fetid ogres and sweet-smelling princesses, sea monsters and slayers, old crones and kings, but each story has a distinct contemporary resonance.
These three intertwining tales of faraway kingdoms long, long ago are peopled by a stellar cast: Salma Hayek, John C Reilly, Toby Jones and Vincent Cassel. The film is in English, but the director is an Italian, Matteo Garrone, who made the mafia movie Gomorrah.
Garrone brings a robust bloodlust and erotic overtones to these classic 17th-century tales, which were originally collected by the Neapolitan poet Giambattista Basile. Italo Calvino described Basile’s book, Pentamerone, as “the dream of a deranged Neapolitan Shakespeare”.
A few years ago, a film such as Tale of Tales might have been too peculiar to stomach with its medieval costumed bonkers-ness, but in the era of Game of Thrones, it has a strange familiarity. The characters are perfect miniatures, in particular Jones, who plays a king with a beautiful daughter, Violet. The king loses his grip when he becomes obsessed — and this is a sight to behold — with a giant flea. While others might have played this for laughs, Jones takes on the mien of a worried accountant poleaxed by sudden adoration, which is as funny as it is touching. “Scootchie, scootchie coo,” he trills to his lumbering pet.
There is something of the circus, or perhaps the flea-circus, about this drama. Fire-eaters and tightrope walkers are used to further the plots, which constantly make leaps into the unexpected. The traditional story of a princess and an ogre develops a distinctly feminist turn, ditching romance for power. Bebe Cave makes a splendidly stroppy Princess Violet, who is well read in the romantic tales of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere and disappointed by the inadequacies of her suitors and her father.
Hayek, with her regal, dark Hispanic features, takes the we-are-not-amused look to new levels as a queen who cannot conceive a child. In her story, The Queen, a necromancer offers her a child, a life for a life. Fertility treatment is a trial, however, and will only work if the king (a put-upon, cheery Reilly) kills an enormous sea monster, cuts out its heart, has it cooked by a virgin and feeds it to the queen. There’s a stunning shot in which Hayek, all in black against a filigree white palace, munches into a red heart the size of a rugby ball. Mother love is all-consuming here.
Garrone has a wonderful eye for colour. He trained as a painter, and some scenes have a whiff of Goya, others of the pre-Raphaelites, and the Italian landscapes are given time to fill the screen. The cinematographer, Peter Suschitzky, is well employed. Instead of mocking up palaces in the studio or with CGI, he uses real ones: the pale-stone, octagonal Castel del Monte features in The Flea section, the Royal Palace of Naples and its gardens stand in for another fairytale kingdom, and Donnafugata Castle provides the stone labyrinth that becomes a playground for strange albino twins in The Queen.
The third intertwining tale is of The Flayed Woman, a parable for the Botox age. Hayley Carmichael and Shirley Henderson are two stained old sisters who work dyeing hanks of wool in their stinking hovel, but they sing like angels as they work, and the king (this time a super-horny Cassell) is enraptured on hearing the voices, imagines exquisite maidens, and demands his droit de seigneur.
Actually, the ladies are pretty keen even without the king’s gifts of pearls and gems, but there remains the problem that their liver-spotted, wrinkled skin is not in tune with their youthful singing. Can they bed the king in the dark? Henderson’s high-pitched girly voice makes a brilliant comic contrast here.
Logic is not the strong point of this genre and the interwoven tales can be hard to follow; sometimes it’s best just to immerse yourself in the tide of madness. This whimsical concoction will not be for everyone, and at some points it reminded me of that creepy East German children’s film The Singing Ringing Tree, which was shown as a series long ago on the BBC. There hasn’t been anything like Tale of Tales since, perhaps, Neil Jordan and Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves. Its images will stay with you long afterwards. Just don’t take the kids.
Matteo Garrone, 15, 134min
TALE OF TALES Official Trailer (2015)
The big film: Tale of Tales
This lustily fantastical English-language feature from the Italian writer-director Matteo Garrone is described on screen as being “loosely based onThe Tale of Tales by Giambattista Basile”, the Neapolitan writer whose 17th-century fairytales inspired Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and more. The subtitle for Basile’s most celebrated work was Entertainment for Little Ones, although the BBFC’s description of Garrone’s 15-rated film (“strong sex, violence and gory images”) makes it clear that this is definitely not for minors. Bawdy romping, meaty heart-munching and toothy creature-feature fare are all on the menu in this sprawling collage of fables that owes as much to David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch as to Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves.
There are certainly traces of both William Burroughs’s surreal hallucinations andAngela Carter’s psychoanalytic feminism in the fleshy screenplay, co-written with Edoardo Albinati, Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudioso. Visually, Garrone cites Goya,Fellini and Mario Bava as key inspirations, in addition to which I spied traces of the magical realism of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the skin-peeling horror of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, and the ambiguous monsters of Wes Craven’sThe Hills Have Eyes, with just a touch of the bug-like weirdness of Vincenzo Natali’s Splice. Blimey.
Beginning with the tale of the childless Queen of Longtrellis (Salma Hayek) who would rather lose her husband to a sea monster than go without offspring – “a violent desire such as yours can only be satisfied with violence…” – Tale of Talesintertwines three rites of passage narratives that collectively portray female self-determination through steely (and frequently tragic) resolve. In one strand,Shirley Henderson’s ageing Imma is separated from her beloved sister whenVincent Cassel’s randy King of Strongcliff (the wolf who claws at the door of their “lowly pigsty”) becomes besotted with a beautiful voice. What follows may be read as a very modern parable about the tyranny of youth and the savagery of cosmetic surgery. But it is also a timeless portrayal of the bonds of sisterly love, a theme amplified by both the defiance and pathos of Henderson’s wonderful performance.
The strongest thread, however, follows the abandonment of the young princess Violet (Bebe Cave) by her vain and foolish father, superbly played by the mercurial Toby Jones. A sequence in which his King of Highhills is distracted from his daughter’s adoring song by the infatuating antics of a leaping flea has the wordlessly expressive comedy of Chaplin or Keaton, a symphony of silent film magic that reminds us that Jones cut his teeth studying physical theatre and clowning at the Lecoq school in Paris.
Garrone describes Basile’s tales as epitomising “that blend between the real and fantastic which has always characterised my artistic endeavours”, a statement that may surprise fans of the director’s most celebrated work, Gomorrah, an unflinchingly “realist” portrait of Neapolitan crime and corruption. Yet as 2012’sReality demonstrated, there has long been an operatic quality to Garrone’s work, and in Tale of Tales we find outlandish flights of folklore fancy rooted in the terra firma of the tangible world. Astonishing locations lay the foundations, from Apulia’s octagonal Castel del Monte to the otherworldly wonders of Sicily’s Alcantara gorge – real settings that evoke unreal, theatrical environments.
As for the creature effects, the decision to use computer graphics merely to enhance rather than replace old-fashioned puppetry and animatronics pays down-to-earth dividends. Here be dragons that one can believe in, creatures whose forms seem physical rather than digital, particularly when viewed through the underwater fog of a diver’s helmet, like exotic escapees from a movie byGeorges Méliès or Guy Maddin.
Having worked with Cronenberg on films as diverse as Naked Lunch and eXistenZ, the cinematographer Peter Suschitzky is well versed in conjuring realistic dreamscapes, and his widescreen frame gorges itself on a tapestry of bold colours (bloody reds, verdant greens, stark whites) and architectural intrigues. Always on the move, the camera tracks, circles and shadows its protagonists, from the opening shot, which finds jugglers and jesters limbering up in a dusty street, to a hunt through a maze (later echoed in a ravine), which recalls the circling madness of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Meanwhile, Alexandre Desplat’s score counterposes a recurrent Edward Scissorhands-style nursery rhyme theme with more sombre strains of dread, moving back and forth between music-box tinklings and the booming alarums of war.
Although also currently available via on demand TV, Tale of Tales really needs to be seen on the big screen. Having watched it both ways, I can attest that much devilish detail is missed on home viewing. This is a theatrical piece: a three-ring circus of a movie for which front row seats are highly recommended.
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