I Would Like to See It: Tale of Tales

You might be forgiven, after decades of Disney “fairytales” and their “twisted” reboots — universally safe, morally digestible, and bland — for forgetting what fairytales are really like. Director Mattea Garrone’s Tale of Tales, adapted from Renaissance poet Giambattista Basile’s collection of the same name, has not forgotten. Its occasionally overlapping but largely discrete stories are full of the arbitrary cruelty, stupidity, and just-so logic of the original material. A witch (Kathryn Hunter) breastfeeds a crone (Hayley Carmichael) and restores her to youth and beauty, leaving said crone’s elderly sister (Shirley Henderson) so distraught that she has herself flayed by an unscrupulous blacksmith in an attempt to become young again. A queen (Salma Hayek) desires a child with such single-minded intensity that she sacrifices her husband (John C. Reilly) by sending him off on a quest to slay a sea monster so that by eating its heart she might become pregnant.

Tale of Tales is enchanting in its disregard for modern morality and the conventions of current drama. Its stories weave and wind according to the violent randomness of late medieval life, its action propelled by things like a lustful king (Vincent Cassell) overhearing a snatch of song on the air or another monarch (Toby Jones) finding a flea on the cuff of his jacket. Every utterance, no matter how nonsensical, binds its speaker as surely as chains, and every fight is mortal and perilous. The film’s production design by the famed Dimitri Capuani is a riot of the familiar and the bizarre, melding digitized matte paintings with unusual lenses, puppetry, and CGI to create an obvious illusion more bewitching than the most seamless effect. The costumes, too, are breathtaking. In particular the cowled singlet worn by the nameless necromancer (Franco Pistoni) who dispatches the king on his quest is haunting, an off-putting mixture of robe and unitard which renders Pistoni alien and insubstantial.

The film’s colors are a touch washed out, though not so much as to render them unidentifiable or joyless, but its visual flourishes more than make up for this slight shortfall. A sequence in which Salma Hayek, dressed all in mourning black, devours the massive heart of a sea monster in the pristine white hall of her Moorish castle is among the most spellbinding in the past decade of fantasy film, and the gruesomely triumphant homecoming of a princess (Bebe Cave) sold in marriage to an ogre (Guillaume Delaunay) rivals any other great “bloody woman” image for the sheer skill involved in its makeup and in Hill’s delicately expressive close-up acting. Tale of Tales is a sumptuous visual feast which succeeds more fully as a genuine fairytale than any other work of art yet made this century.