Under the benevolent gaze of Ingrid Bergman, this 68th edition’s godmother who beckons from the festival poster and the giant photo on the Palais, Cannes has really gotten underway and with it the parade of stars. After Katherine Deneuve and Julianne Moore who graced the “marches” for the opening, Salma Hayek made her way on the red carpet for Tale of Tales. Matteo Garrone’s bewitching fairytale is one of three Italian films in competition this year and the Roman director is a two-time winner here (with Gomorra in 2008 and Reality in 2012). This latest entry shows him to be one of the most eclectic talents working in Italy today. The film is fantasy adapted from the Pentamerone a seventeenth century book of fables by Neapolitan nobleman and author Giambattista Basile who wrote a collection of tales including the original versions of classics like Puss in Boots and Cinderella, which were subsequently reworked by the brothers Grimm and ultimately given the children’s tales treatment we are most familiar with by Walt Disney. After revisiting Italian cinema’s tradition of social docudrama popular in the 70s (notably the films of Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri) in Gomorra,
Garrone explores narrative territory which has been the purview of recent American TV series (Grimm, Once Upon a Time) and films like Into The Woods. But Tale of Tales is definitely an auteur take on dark whimsy even though it is shot in English with an international cast that includes Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones and John C Reilly. The film really has three intertwining narrative threads and tells the stories of a barren queen (Salma Hayek) who goes to extreme measures to become a mother (most notably involving the eating of the heart of a sea monster). Another king (Toby Jones) has an only daughter of marrying age but transfers his affections to a giant flea and yet another monarch (Vincent Cassel), with an unquenchable passion for the flesh, mistakenly seduces an old woman with unexpected consequences. Sublimely photographed by veteran cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (The Empire Strikes Back, Mars Attacks) and beautifully scored by Alexander Desplat, the film is strikingly visual, also thanks to the extraordinary Puglia locations where it was shot. Garrone has cited influences as diverse as Game of Thrones, Pinocchio and Fellini’s Casanova and it certainly does not lack for spectacle or production value. Where this lush allegory perhaps falls short is in Garrone’s refusal to assign morality and metaphor to his fables, which perhaps accounts for some of the perplexity of part of the Cannes public.
With fellow director and Palm d’Or winner Paolo Sorrentino, Garrone has been rightly credited with revitalizing Italian film making. Tale of Tales shows that he is not done.
Luca Celada