The only component of Tale of Tales that feels familiar is the spoken language of the film. It’s in English, the first such film from Italian director Matteo Garrone. English being my native tongue, I was able to understand the words that these actors spoke, out loud, to one another.
Everything else in Tale of Tales is left lingering in the bizarre reaches of one’s mind. Tale of Tales is an adaptation of a collection of fairy tales and fables from the 17th century Italian poet Giambattista Basile. In Garrone’s film (and perhaps the tales themselves) they come as independent stories taking place in three separate kingdoms. Occasionally the stories overlap, but Garrone does not weave them over time into a recognizable cinematic narrative. Instead he leaves them as distinct, largely uneventful, segments.
These are grown-up fairytales; fantasy/horror is the genre here, though given the slow pace and rarity of action, both of those terms fail to capture Tale of Tales with any degree of accuracy. Adult fairytales are not uncommon at the movies these days. Everything from the comic entertainments of Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, to the imaginative horrors of fabulist Guillermo Del Toro have brought fairytales to adult audiences.
But Garrone’s film doesn’t really fit comfortably in that company either. He has the material here for a straight fantasy film about a fictional land with three kingdoms and their rulers: A queen (Salma Hayek) who is desperate to bear children, a king (Vincent Cassel) who engages in greedy womanizing, and another king (Toby Jones) who rejects his daughter in favor of a pet flea. Rather than fit these stories into a tortuous single thread, Garrone seems to have taken the nature of fairytales and their quixotic moralizing at their most literal cinematic value: they are short, odd stories left to the audience to interpret.
Which is no surprise. Garrone’s previous work has embraced the unexpected and left audiences in wonder. His mob and crime film, 2009’s Gamorrah, is his most well known film, famous for its flipping the high-drama mob world of American cinema and opting instead for constant murder. Tale of Tales creates a sense of wonder too; more along the lines of “I wonder what is going on, here?”
Pairing a film like Gamorrah with the sometimes agonizingly slow Tale of Tales puts Garrone’s work into sharp contrast, to be sure. Gamorrah is a great and urgent film, one that begs to be discussed. Tale of Tales is a ponderous and unusual, a film that puzzles over its own creation. Everything is fake, distorted, slightly unreal.
There are beautiful, bizarre moments in the movie: Salma Hayek in widow’s black devouring a giant heart in a white-stone palace hall, or a hideous old woman’s transformation into a beautiful, if unnatural looking woman. Then there are the false moments that read like film-school work: Toby Jones’ beloved giant flea, toddling around the royal palace, never for a moment reads like a real creature.
But reality is not Garrone’s concern, here. The film wears its film-ness at all times, and not unintentionally. When Tale of Tales played at Cannes, where it competed for the Palm d’Or, the director was asked about the locations he used to shoot his fairy tale. Garrone said “Our basic idea has been to find real locations that look like they could be studio sets. We found places that give you the feel that they could be reconstructed in a studio, but they are actually real.”
Think about that. Real locations made to look like sets? Why not just use sets? Another puzzle, I suppose. Unriddle that one and you might find the key to the mystery that is Tale of Tales.
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