Il racconto dei racconti
Matteo Garrone (2015)
Shortly after the death of the Neopolitan courtier and poet Giambattista Basile in 1632, his sister published the fairy stories her brother had collected. Basile’s Pentamerone is considered Europe’s first collection of fairytales and was an acknowledged influence on the stories of later, more famous names – Charles Perrault, the Grimms, Hans Christian Andersen. The Pentamerone contains the prototypes for tales including Cinderella, Rapunzel, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel. Three other stories from the collection form the basis of Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales (with a screenplay by the director, Edoardo Albinati, Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudioso). The film is Garrone’s first in English. Its co-producers are Italian, French and British. Its cast includes American, British, French and Italian actors.
Tale of Tales has been well received by most English language critics: it’s currently 83% ‘fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes (from eighty-six reviews). In one important sense, the praise is justified. Garrone’s movie cost only $14.5m – a small fraction of a recent Disney production like Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella ($95m), let alone the previous year’s Maleficent ($263m): Tale of Tales looks as much a million dollars as either of them. The film was shot entirely on location in various parts of Italy and the production designer Dimitri Capuani has done a superb job. The cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and the make-up team have helped Garrone create remarkable images, especially of metamorphosis. Even so, some of the praise for Tale of Tales is evidence of the automatic preferential treatment some critics give to art house cinema – even when, as in this case, it’s international co-production art house. While it may seem unfair to say this about a film that’s splendidly costumed (by Massimo Cantini Parrini), it’s evidence too that the parable of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes is enduring. Kate Muir in the Times finds the film refreshing ‘in these days of Disney sanitisation’; it is either ‘fantastically unhinged’ or ‘gloriously mad’ or ‘magnificently loopy’, depending on whether you’re Deborah Ross in the Spectator, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian or Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. Yet Tale of Tales, though made on a relative shoestring, is essentially the same deal as the Disney pictures. The technological possibilities of film are used to realise the supernatural and physically transformative elements in fairy tales. Scary monsters upstage the morals of the stories and the characters in them. What’s more (and worse), Matteo Garrone interweaves the three narratives unimaginatively and tells the tales very slowly.
The cast includes some big names in monarch roles – Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, John C Reilly. The last-named is uncomfortable as a king who goes deep-sea-diving to bring back the heart of a sea monster – after a necromancer (Franco Pistoni: great face) assures the king and his sadly barren queen (Hayek) that partaking of the creature’s heart will make her pregnant. It’s a relief when Reilly’s character, as a result of his encounter with the monster, dies and the actor is put out of his misery. Salma Hayek looks quite extraordinarily beautiful but her story, at least in its adaptation here, is the weakest of the three. The virgin servant girl who cooks the sea monster’s heart is also impregnated as a result. She and the queen give birth to prince-and-pauper boys who grow up to be identical twins (Christian and Jonah Lees) and fast friends, whom the queen jealously and unwisely separates.
The king played by Toby Jones first becomes obsessed with a flea that keeps on growing and growing, until it takes sick and dies. The king then hands his daughter Violet (Bebe Cave) over to an ogre (Guillaume Delaunay): he’s the only one of her suitors who can identify the massive animal hide hanging in the palace as that of a flea. (The king’s proclamation promised that whoever solved this riddle would receive Princess Violet as their prize.) Bebe Cave is excellent as Violet, and she and Jones work well together. They are wittily modern but avoid sending up the material (the comedy around the mega-flea, however, is fairly hard work).
As usual in English language films, Vincent Cassel looks more impressive than he sounds. His libidinous king falls in love with the voice of a woman called Dora (Hayley Carmichael), whom he determines to bed. There he discovers that she’s a wrinkled crone – the king’s guards throw Dora from the window of his bedchamber. Her fall is broken by the branches of a tree in which she gets tangled and from which she’s freed by a witch (Kathryn Hunter), who turns Dora into a beautiful young woman (Stacy Martin) much more to the king’s liking. Her devoted sister Imma (Shirley Henderson), who pines for Dora, is surprised to receive an invitation to, and gorgeous outfit for, the king’s wedding. Imma’s joy at discovering that his bride is the transformed Dora is short-lived. She can’t resist watching the newlyweds making love and is thrown out of the palace. Imma now determines also to be made young again. She gives the jewels she wore at the wedding to a knife sharpener (Kenneth Collard) in exchange for his flaying her. Shirley Henderson gives what is emotionally the strongest performance in Tale of Tales. There’s a poignancy too in Imma’s longing for youth when you know that, under the expert old-lady make-up, is the distinctive, somehow bruised beauty of an actress now herself middle aged. What turns out to be the transience of Dora’s magical rejuvenation is an anti-climax in comparison.
The full title of Giambattista Basile’s collection is Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille – ‘the tale of tales, or entertainment for little ones’. In a closing legend, Matteo Garrone dedicates his film to his own children. It’s to be hoped they are old enough to see it: the junior audience for Tale of Tales has been limited by the ‘strong sex, violence and gory images’ which have resulted in a 15 certificate. This is, says Kate Muir, ‘an adult fairy tale’ – a reminder that, in spite of its subtitle, the original Pentamerone wouldn’t primarily have been considered ‘children’s stories’. And whereas the material of Basile’s tales derived from a folkloric oral tradition, the published work could, of course, be enjoyed only by the literate minority. There’s a kind of comical correspondence between the original readership of Lo cunto de li cunti and the tonier-than-Disney mentality expressed in some of the critical enthusiasm for Tale of Tales.
21 June 2016
