(Italy/France/UK, 135 min.)
Dir. Matteo Garrone, Writ. Edoardo Albinati, Ugo Chiti,
Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudiso
Starring: Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, Shirley
Henderson, Hayley Carmichael, Bebe Cave, Christian Lees, Jonah Lees
 |
| Salma Hayek stars in Tale of Tales. Courtesy of Les Films Séville. |
Once upon a time,
there was a movie genre. It transported audiences from place to place, borough
to borough, quartier to quartier, coffeehouse to coffeehouse, and era to era.
New York stories, Parisian love letters, coffee cups and cigarette butts, and
legends of red violins all left film lovers with fond memories of tales of
tales.
The anthology film, though, doesn’t hold the same place in movieland as short stories do in the world of literature. Outside of a few great examples, they rarely work. Not every filmmaker is Alice Munro.
Matteo Garrone takes the latest stab at multi-narrative
filmmaking with the fairy tale anthology The
Tale of Tales. The Italian filmmaker does the Christopher Nolan thing by
returning the genre back to its origins and doing away with the lighter,
sillier stuff audiences see in many fairy tale films and fantastical odysseys.
Garrone doesn’t strip the fairy tales down, but he makes them dark as he and a
trio of additional screenwriters adapt three stories from Giambattista Basile’s
Pentamerone. The source
material describes the stories as “entertainment for little ones,” but there is
no mistaking that this fairy tale triptych is not for kids.
The first, and probably strongest, of the three stories
stars Salma Hayek as a wrathful queen hungry to have a child and produce an
heir. Her husband (John C. Reilly, in an unfortunately short-lived performance)
brings her the heart of a sea beast to fulfill a prophecy that also involves a
virgin, Immaculate Conception, and twenty-four hour pregnancy. Gifted with an
albino son, Elias (Christian Lee), and his identical “moon twin” (Jonah Lee),
the queen fumes that her kingdom might be at risk to the ambitions of a poor
bastard who looks just like her son.
Story the second goes next door to the neighbouring kingdom
and features two old wrinkly sisters (Shirley Henderson and Hayley Carmichael),
who draw the interest of their king (Vincent Cassel). The king, prone to bouts
of whoring, wants to bed the women on whom he’s never laid eyes. A trick, a
ruse, an aghast king, and a suckle on a witch’s breast later, and one of the
sisters is transformed into a tight, young, and fuckable maiden.
The third and stupidest tale of Tales offers a mad king (Toby Jones) who loves a giant flea and betroths
his daughter (Bebe Cave) to an ogre that weirdly looks like Jason Statham. Some
ill-fated carnies up the body count.
A fit of ire and a flaying later, stories one and two
deliver some fantastical bouts of adventure and dark humour. Hayek is
devilishly fun as she chews the scenery, both figuratively and literally, as the
angry, paranoid queen who yields her love like a weapon. The story of the
sisters, on the other hand, is bizarre and darkly funny, a carnivalesque
episode of Nip and Tuck as the sister
played by Shirley Henderson longs for the youth that her sister enjoys. Garrone
slathers Tale of Tales in blood,
gore, sex, and violence. These tales aren’t the sugary delights of Walt Disney’s
imagination: they’re debauched and sinister fables sown from the roots of fairy
tale lore.
The inanity of storyline three, however, kills any humour or
flight of wonder that stories one and two conjure with their fantastic voyages.
This repetitive and utterly humorless debacle doesn’t charm at all even though
it tries its damnedest to endear itself to the audience. The film especially
suffers from lesser star power and diminished screen presence of its players compared
to Hayek, Cassel, and Henderson’s performances in spite of the over the top
boobery that plays out as king, flea, princess, and ogre play a game of
matchmaking gone awry. Nothing about it works.
What does work in Tale
of Tales works marvellously, though, as Garrone calls up a spectacular
production. Even when Tale of Tales
is sluggishly boring, it’s a magical feast for the eyes as the dark tailoring
of this fantasy world is a bewitching vision. The sumptuous costumes by Massimo
Cantini Parrini are simply stunning, while the elaborate production design by Dimitri Capuani
and Alessia Anfuso is wild and vivid—both achievements of Tale of Tales’ artisanship is especially high for a modest
international co-production. The cinematography by David Cronenberg regular
Peter Suschitzky, finally, is gloriously dark and moody.
The moral of the story in Tale of Tales is that an anthology is rarely the sum of its parts.
As competing storylines pause and skip to the next chapter, each narrative arc
loses its appeal and momentum. Storylines are abandoned, characters disappear,
and the weight of one rotten apple poisons the bushel. The nature of the film
also burdens each of the three stories with a heavy load of exposition, and
even at 135 minutes, A Tale of Tales
leaves the audience with a trio of fairy tales that seem only partly told.
…
Then, one magical day,
filmmakers decided that anthology films don’t work.
And Cinemablographer lived happily ever after.
Tale of Tales is now on home video from eOne Films.
