Garrone: I Racconto Dei Racconti (Tale of Tales) (2015)

More so than at perhaps any time in film history, we are bereft of fairy tales. Once upon a time, they were what drove children’s cinema, but as studios like Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks have set out to craft a new kind of children’s cinema for adults, fairy tales have tended to fall by the wayside in the name of high-concept experimentation. Without taking away from those experiments, it’d be hard to deny that they tend to proceed precisely by removing the adult component that make the greatest fairy tales so resonant, infantilising adults rather than giving children the genuine glimpse of the adult kingdom that makes the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault so fascinating. With Tale of Tales, Matteo Garrone provides a kind of corrective to that, fashioning a sequence of fairy tales that – apart from a few sexually explicit moments – seem designed to speak to children in the same way that Roald Dahl did at his darkest, as envoys from a grown-up world that requires the utmost preparation in advance to survive. The key to Garrone’s vision is that the three tales he chooses to adapt are not taken from the Brothers Grimm but Giambattista’s Pentamerone, a Neapolitan answer to the Decameron regularly cited by the Grimms and other romantic nationalists as the foundational fairy tale text, even if its stories have been distorted, adapted and in some ways sanitised into the characters and incidents we know today. By returning to that source, Garrone presents a world that’s both familiar and unfamiliar, from the King of Strongcliff (Vincent Cassel) who woos a beautiful young woman on the basis of her voice alone, to the Queen of Longtrellis (Salma Hayek) who will go to any lengths to bear a child, to the King of Highhills (Toby Jones), who’s distracted from finding a husband for his daughter by the most curious of pets. Watching these stories play out is truly like witnessing a classic fairy tale for the first time, with Garrone drawing on the post-industrial voids that characterised the much more contemporary Neapolitan vision of Gomorra to return, time and again, to the quietest, stillest and most surreal moments in each story, typically characters traversing or negotiating some fantastic space carved out by the Southern Italian backdrops and Baroque architecture against which it all unfolds. If the best fairy stories have the ability to distill themselves into a single space, scene or vista capable of haunting a child’s mind for years to come, then Tale of Tales subsists on those spaces, setting them adrift on Alexandre Desplat’s beautiful score, and only occasionally puncturing them with the bloodthirsty action of Garrone’s other films. In that sense, the film plays as a bit of an object lesson in restraint as a fantasy tactic, recalling Game of Thrones only to remind you how brutality can quickly tire if you pile it on too thick. Faced with the obligation of a fairy tale ending, Garrone strikes a beautiful balance between happiness and horror, always twisting and turning things so that you’re not quite sure when the happy ending is going to take over, and thickening supense into that sense of deep time and duration that fairy tales seem to exude, especially when they’re suffused with the plastic realism on display here, a palpable and tangible delight in prostheses, animatronics and the sheer physical texture of Garrone’s fantasy world. With each story fixated on class reversals so improbable that they send a magical ripple through the entire universe – collapsing people, animals and objects into a single melancholic, metamorphic texture in the process – it’s not hard to see in it an allegory of post-Berlusconi Italy, the third part of the trilogy that started with Gomorra and Reality. But the sheer plastic presence of the film also seems to defy allegory as well, bringing it closer to the igneous coastlines of Rossellini's trilogy more than anything else, as Garrone's characters freeze convulsions underfoot into great galactic geological amphitheatres of space that feel like the very precipice of Italy even or especially when they're landlocked, just as it's only through the purest fantasy that he manages to recapture the spirit of neorealism for an era in which realism itself has become the tool of the powerful, the corrupt and the wealthy, all of whom are so wonderfully skewered here.