‘Il racconto dei racconti‘ (or ‘Tale of Tales‘ in the English version) made in 2015 proves once again that Matteo Garrone is one of the most significant Italian directors of the moment, able to approach various genres with self-confidence and a perfect mastery of means of expression, while bringing his contributions and personal vision in each of his films. Based, but without faithfully adapting, on three of the stories in the collection of Giambattista Basile, an Italian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm, Garrone‘s film builds a gallery of colorful and credible characters, and around them a world populated with monsters and medieval castles, with passions and violence, in which the viewer is transported and absorbed during the over two hours of screening. The combination of fairy tales and horror, present in the subtext and in the bolder cinematic interpretations of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales, is explicit here, and the result is even more than a collection of fairy tales for adults.
The three stories are interleaved and independent, they come together in a final scene that has no impact on separate narrative threads, united by the space of legend in which they occur – a late Middle Ages that coexist with the world of legends with kings and princesses who live in castles surrounded by forests populated by animals, monsters and ogres. The kings and princesses of the three kingdoms, who are the heroes of the stories, suffer from the same existential diseases and traumas that humanity is haunted to this day, but to deal with them they have at hand magic and spells instead of the contemporary science and its experts. A king and a queen cannot have children and the solution is suggested to them by a monk or maybe a wizard who proposes a Faustian deal. The result will be the birth of two twins through a birth that today we would call artificial, whose destinies will be united despite differences in rank. Another king spends his nights in debauchery, until he hears the voice of a woman who charms him, but the voice does not belong exactly to the young virgin he had imagined. Finally, the king of the third kingdom maintains a flea as a pet with disastrous consequences, including for his only daughter sent to marry an ogre who solves the oracle problem that was the condition for acquiring the princess’ hand. The stories take place in a setting of legends created by Alessia Anfuso, the characters are dressed in magnificent costumes and extremely precise in details created by Massimo Cantini Parrini, and everything is superbly filmed by Peter Suschitzky. Remarkable is the use of classic movie studio effects with a minimal amount of computer graphics.
Each of these stories has equivalents in the world of fairy tales we know, but the screenwriters who adopted Basile‘s stories avoid the beaten path. The twins will not change their identities as in ‘Prince and Beggar’, the ogre will prove cruel and violent to the end unlike the cursed prince in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and only the return to youth will prove to be temporary as in ‘ Youth Without Old Age’. Narrative twists often include a dose of naturalistic and horror violence, but they are packed in cinematic beauty and expressiveness. Remarkable is the psychological depth of most of the characters, the result of intelligent writing and acting talent. The queen embodied by Salma Hayek evolves from a loving wife who is ready to do anything to give birth to a child to a black widow and an possessing mother. Toby Jones and Bebe Cave embody a father-daughter couple in which he, the king, is dominated by his esoteric passions, and she, a princess, must find the strength alone to face terrible trials. The only wasted talent seemed to me to be that of Vincent Cassel, an actor I really like, but who here could not overcome the limitations of the role of a king sexually obsessed to the level of ridicule, a character to whom he added nothing of his usual intelligence and charm.
The beginning and the end frame the stories in a space of legend like the ones told in popular fairs, but these are not exactly the innocent fairy tales that were told to us as children.