Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales, an
interpretation of classic baroque Neapolitan fairy tales
influenced by Game of Thrones, Mario Bava and Goya, has wowed
the press crowd at Cannes ahead of its premiere in competition
Thursday night.
It is the third tilt at the Palme d'Or for Garrone, who
landed the second prize, the Grand Jury Prize, with 2008's
Gomorrah and 2012's Reality.
"It's an ambitious and frankly unthinking bid to translate
the enchanted, archaic world of Giambattista Basile's 'Lo cunto
de li cunti'," Garrone told an admiring press Thursday.
Basile, Garrone pointed out, "was the first writer to talk
about Cinderella, Puss in Boots and the Sleeping Beauty".
The director's job, he said, was made easier by the
richness of the source material, "a universe of timeless
characters that is a product of its time but also modern and
still relevant today because it delineates, like in all fairy
tales, true archetypes".
The 12-million-euro international coproduction, starring
Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones and Vincent Cassel, is,
like Paolo Sorrentino's Cannes offering Youth, written and acted
in English.
Juggling leitmotifs like birth, death, the cult of the
body and desire, the film eschews English-style high Gothic,
however, as Garrone infuses each tale with the light touch of
Italian illustrated fairy tales such as the ones admired and
collected by great 20th-century writer Italo Calvino.
The first tale, The Enchanted Doe, with Hayek and Reilly,
is about two sad childless monarchs who enlist the help of a
sorcerer to try to conjure up an heir by risking the life of
another - only to produce an albino duo, one the offspring of a
servant, who re-enact the eternal myth of the doppelganger.
In the second story, The Flea, Jones plays another doleful
king who feeds an insect with his blood until it becomes as big
as a pig, flays it and offers his daughter's hand to whoever can
guess where the hide comes from. The winner is a florid ogre who
whisks the girl off to his mountain lair.
In the third tale, The Skinned Old Woman - seen by many
critics as a metaphor for cosmetic surgery - another king,
played by Cassel, falls in love with a woman because of her
voice only to find out that she is a crone.
Through magic, however, she succeeds in regaining her
youth and becoming queen - though that turns out to be less than
a permanent fix.
Garrone said Basile's text was so far from contemporary
mainstream language that "I would have had to resort to a
translation in any case, even if I'd shot it in Italian".
"But English makes it universal, it gives me hope to reach
audiences worldwide - and that's fitting because, as Calvino
said, Basile is the deformed dream of a Neapolitan Shakespeare".
Garrone, who put his own money into a project "I deeply
believe in", said the film was, of course, Italian in many ways.
"The Italian bits are the crew, the technical staff, the
iconic locations all around Italy including the Gole di
Alcantara in Sicily, (Emperor) Fredrick II's Castel del Monte in
Puglia, Dimitri Capuani's set design, Massimo Cantini Parini's
costumes and Leonardo Cruciali's monsters".
Tales of Tales, he went on, "is a female film, but written
by four male authors - Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso, Edoardo
Albinati and myself.
"We wrote it, but the actresses were the ones who really
brought it alive".
Garrone praised all the actors for their "incredibly
generous contribution".
Hayek raised one of the press conference's many laughs
when she recounted how "I ran around, hither and yon, for fully
45 minutes with this heavily brocaded dress on, until I got to
the way out (of the labyrinth) and Matteo told me the light was
wrong and we had to do it all over again".
Reilly provoked more amusement when he confessed: "I've
found out more about the film at this press conference than I
did all the time I was making it.
The first press reviews were mixed, but many were ripe with
praise.
"Cannes already has a stand-out movie," said the Guardian.
Hollywood Reporter said: "Tale of Tales combines the wildly
imaginative world of kings, queens and ogres with the kind of
lush production values Italian cinema was once famous for.
"The result is a dreamy, fresh take on the kind of dark and
gory yarns that have come down to us from the Brothers Grimm and
Charles Perrault, only here they're pleasingly new and
unfamiliar".
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