I didn’t realize how much I’d missed hearing a really good fairy-tale.
Of all the great Italian films that have come out this year, and it has been by far the best year since I’ve started keeping track, Matteo Garrone’s English language ‘Tale of Tales’ is my favorite. I only wish I could have seen it in a movie theater, with popcorn and my traditional diet coke but no matter, it was still an incredibly satisfying movie experience.
In the first few minutes, with scenes of a medieval circus and fanciful performers acting as court jesters with jokes and pantomimes that, I guess, seemed howlingly funny in the 1600s, I thought, “Uh-oh, Garrones’s gone Fellini on us.” I braced myself for the unbridled silliness that can (at times) make me uncomfortable, and I was afraid that this one might be a little too “mirthfully fanciful.”
I kept watching, because I always keep watching, and in another five minutes and I’d forgotten I was even watching a movie; it felt more like I was reading a great old fairy tale book that I’d found in my Grandmother’s attic.
And it just kept getting better and better.
The story is broken into three main parts, the first, of a king (John C. Reilly) and queen (Salma Hayek), desperately hoping for a baby but so far unsuccessful. A necromancer (magician) suggests a solution; if the queen would eat the heart of an aquatic dragon cooked by a virgin, it would make her instantly pregnant. That the answer to the queen’s prayers comes at a big cost doesn’t bother her, and her baby is born. But, as mothers sometimes forget, baby’s grow up, and this mother really can’t handle the whole “leaving the nest” thing.
The next, is about a king and his pet flea, one that he cherishes more than his own daughter.
And then there are the two old women, one with a lovely singing voice that enchants a king, assuming she’s as beautiful as her voice. When he seeks her out and wants to see her, she hatches a plan to keep him interested, one that will cause both of them a lot of trouble.
There are so many great things about Tale of Tales:
- It is GORGEOUS. The cinematography is dreamy and creepy, with wild bursts of color and imagination.
- It is exciting and even scary, with monsters. ogres, and witches popping out around every corner.
- It has the most incredible cast, with Selma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, John C. Reilly, and Alba Rohrwacher.
- It is oddly relevant to today’s society, with plenty of morals to the stories, the ones our parents wanted to get when they read us to us as children.
But it’s not for children. There’s sex, blood, and adult situations, just like the original fairy-tales written in the 1600s by the author, Giambattista Basile, who predated and inspired more well-known story-tellers like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Apparently, Basile is responsible for the earliest version of Cinderella.
I’ll give Basile credit for the great material, but Garrone deserves a lot too, for a bringing it to life in a way that could only have been exceeded in my own mind with my own imagination.
Maybe it’s just me, but I would have been very excited to see this one sent for Oscar consideration.
I Love Italian Everything 