Tale of Tales (2015 film)

Tale of Tales

Theatrical release poster
Directed by Matteo Garrone
Produced by
Screenplay by
  • Edoardo Albinati
  • Ugo Chiti
  • Matteo Garrone
  • Massimo Gaudioso
Based on Pentamerone 
by Giambattista Basile
Starring
Music by Alexandre Desplat
Cinematography Peter Suschitzky
Edited by Marco Spoletini
Production
companies
Distributed by
Release dates
  • 14 May 2015 (2015-05-14) (Cannes/Italy)
  • 1 July 2015 (2015-07-01) (France)
  • 1 July 2016 (2016-07-01) (UK)
Running time
 133 minutes[1]
Country
  • Italy
  • France
  • United Kingdom
Language English
Budget $14.5 million[2]
Box office $4.7 million (Worldwide)[3]

Tale of Tales (Italian: Il racconto dei racconti) is a 2015 English-language Italian-French-British fantasy horror film, directed by Matteo Garrone, starring Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, and John C Reilly.

An Italian-led production with co-producers in France and the United Kingdom, the film is Garrone's first English-language film. It competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.[4][5]

It is a screen adaptation based on collections of tales by Neapolitan poet and courtier Giambattista Basile: Pentamerone or Lo cunto de li cunti (Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones), which contains the earliest versions of famous fables like Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.[6]

Plot

The Baroque stories manage to mix real and surreal with many metaphorical usages. Pentamerone was a 17th-century collection of fairytales that inspired many authors including the Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault.[7]

The three tales are La Cerva Fatata (The Enchanted Doe), La Pulce (The Flea), La Vecchia Scorticata (The Flayed Old Lady), that have been freely adapted with elements of other tales by Giambattista Basile, as well as a touch of artistic license.[7]

The Queen

The first tale begins in the kingdom of Darkwood (Italian: Selvascura), where the King and Queen have tried everything to have a child, but are not successful. The King loves his Queen, but all she desires is a child. One night, a necromancer provides a risky alternative: the Queen must eat the heart of an aquatic dragon cooked by a virgin, which will make her instantly with child. However, this will also come at the cost of a life. The Queen does not care the price, and thus the King sets off to slay the aquatic dragon, and dies while doing so. The Queen does not mourn the loss of her husband, but only cares for the dragon's heart. Upon eating the heart, the queen bears a son, Elias, in one day's time. Simultaneously, the virgin who cooked the heart for the Queen also gives birth to a boy, Jonah, who looks identical to the young prince, whose destiny will be intertwined with his putative twin.

As time passes, Elias's affections are not for the Queen, but for his friendship with Jonah. This greatly hurts the Queen, who eventually attempts to murder Jonah. As a result, Jonah leaves the kingdom, leaving his Mother and Elias behind. Elias is heart-broken, and tries to convince Jonah to stay, but Jonah informs him that he must go. Jonah takes a knife and plunges it into a tree's roots where a spring of water comes forth. Jonah tells Elias that so long as the tree continues to spout clear water, to know that he is well and alive.

One day, when Elias comes to the tree, he sees blood in the water and immediately leaves to find Jonah. When Elias arrives in Jonah's village, Jonah's sweetheart and friends mistake Elias for him. Elias claims to have lost his memory, and discovers that Jonah has been missing in the woods for five days, and goes in search of him.

The Queen has the entire kingdom search for Elias, but he cannot be found. The following night, the same necromancer visits the Queen, and tells the Queen it is her fault for Elias's disappearance for trying to separate what is inseparable. However, the necromancer tells the Queen that Elias can be returned for a price that is violent. Without knowing the terms, the Queen accepts the necromancer's offer.

The next day, Elias finds Jonah in a cave, and kills a winged bat-like monster to save him. Elias returns Jonah to his family and departs. It is later revealed that the wretched bat-like creature was the Queen, implying that the necromancer had manipulated the predicament from the inception, based on the inevitable outcome.

The Flea

In the second segment, in the kingdom of Highmountain (Italian: Altomonte) the King lives with his daughter, Violet. Violet loves her father and while rehearsing a song that she has written for him, the King notices a flea that mysteriously can travel from one hand to the other. Distracted by the flea, the King barely notices his daughter's performance. He then captures the flea and hides it in his room, making it his beloved pet, fed on blood and steaks. The flea gradually metamorphoses into a gigantic Kafkaesque domesticated creature. When the flea dies, the King is devastated and decides to skin it and give his daughter as a bride to whomever is able to guess the skin’s provenance. An ogre solves the riddle and wins the princess as his bride. Violet, who has dreamed of marrying a handsome prince, attempts to commit suicide by plunging off the castle's tower to her death, but her father stops her, and says that she must go through with the marriage because he has made it his proclamation. In tears, Violet agrees, stating that her father never loved her at all.

The Ogre takes Violet to his cave on top of a mountain, and the Princess is kept prisoner and raped by the Ogre. One day, while the Ogre is hunting, Violet spots a woman, who is an entertainer, on the other side of the cliff, whom she begs for help. The women tells her she will return tomorrow, and brings her husband and sons to save the Princess by throwing her a rope that one of the sons uses as a tightrope to retrieve the Princess. While the entertainer's son is carrying the Princess on his back on the tightrope, the Ogre returns and is enraged by having the Princess taken from him. The entertainer's husband is able to cut the rope before the Ogre manages to get to them, and the Ogre falls to the depths below. However, the Ogre is not dead and finds the Princess and slays the entertainer's entire family. He is about to kill the Princess, but has a tender moment for her. He's resigned to taking her back to the mountain and motions for the princess to climb on his back. The Princess pretends to get on by placing an arm around him and then slits his throat.

During the time that Violet was away, the King has grown ill. When Violet returns, the King breaks down in tears. Violet throws the ogre's head at her father's feet and informs him that this is the husband that he chose for his daughter. The subjects in the kingdom bow to her, including her father, because now she is Queen. As her father is in tears, Violet too begins to cry.

The Two Old Women

In the third segment, in the kingdom of Stronghold (Italian: Roccaforte), the lustful King is intrigued by a mysterious woman’s celestial singing. Adamant in seducing her, he courts her outside her home, unaware that she is one of the two elderly dyer sisters Imma and Dora. The lustful king is persistent, so Dora agrees to spend the night with the king, as long as it is in complete darkness, so to hide her appearance from him. However, the King's curiosity gets the better of him and he lights a candle to see Dora's face. When he discovers her true appearance he is horrified at having slept with her. The King calls for his guards, who toss Dora out of the King's bed chamber window to her death. However, before Dora reaches the ground, the bed sheets become entangled in a tree. A witch rescues her from the tree, and casts a spell where she turns into a beautiful maiden. Later, the King sees the now young and beautiful Dora (Stacy Martin) and decides to make her his Queen.

Enjoying her new appearance, Dora sends Imma a dress and a wedding invitation to the castle. When Imma sees her at the castle feast, Dora tells her she mustn't tell a soul who she is, as no one would believe her. At the end of the evening, Imma does not want to leave her sister and refuses to leave. She wants to know the secret to her sister's youthful looks, but Dora says she woke up that way after her fall from the window. Imma doesn't believe her and badgers her for the truth. In a fit of anger, Dora says she flayed herself and grew new skin. Then Dora hears the King coming and hides Imma behind a screen while she and the King consummate their marriage. Imma is fascinated and reveals herself while watching the couple make love. The King believes Imma to be the "witch" he slept with and calls for his guards to take her away. Dora tells the King that Imma is her old neighbour and begs him not to hurt her. Once outside the castle, Imma tries to find someone who will flay her. She eventually finds a knife sharpener willing to do the job, for a price. This leaves Imma bloody and disfigured.

The Ending

In the end, Elias, Dora, and her lustful King are among the guests present at Kingdom Highmountain for Violet's official coronation as Queen. As Violet's father walks her to the throne, everyone in the crowd looks up to the sky, where an entertainer is walking across a tightrope that is on fire. At this time, Dora's beauty begins to fade and she begins to return to her former state. Before anyone notices what is happening to her, she manages to flee the Highmountain castle to live the rest of her days alone.

Philosophical meanings

In all three tales, the selfishness of the characters led to their ultimate destruction based on their fixation of lustful desire rather than true love. The Queen of Darkwood's desire for a child consumed her, but she also wished for that love to be reciprocated by the child to her. When Elias did not reciprocate her love, she tried to murder Jonah, which was the person who made Elias happy. Rather than sacrificing her happiness knowing Elias had a soulmate friend, she tried to remove that relationship in hope it would further her relationship with her son. That desire ultimately led to her death by the hands of her own son, who was a product of her own desire.

The King of Highmountain was so fixated on the flea that he lost sight of being a father and sacrificed his daughter, who looked up to him and loved him. The flea was a gross creature and meant to symbolize a hobby or other small, unimportant matter that a parent may indulge rather than focusing on their children. In the end, this mistake stripped the King of both his royal and paternal title. Unlike all the other characters, the King seemed truly repentant for what he had done and was consumed by grief and illness until his daughter's return. However, his prior actions and fixation on the flea can never erase the trauma Violet had to undergo with losing her virginity and innocence at the hands of an ogre. Further, the entertainer's entire family were killed by the ogre in an attempt to save the Princess when the King himself did nothing to rescue her and whose lack of regard and foolishness led to his daughter's plight. It was his daughter who ultimately had to save herself, disgracing the King not only as a King, but as a father as well.

The Lustful King of Strongmountain desired sexual gratification and used his subjects to that regard. However, this addiction led him to sleep with Dora, who was an old woman, based on the illusion of what is beautiful. The reality of the Lustful King having slept with Dora as an old maid disgusts the King so much that he attempts to throw Dora to her death, claiming that she is a witch. Yet, Dora protests that the Lustful King demanded her presence, which was true. Yet, he falls in love with Dora and makes her his Queen once she is transformed into a beautiful maiden. The moral of the story is that the eyes can be misleading and what you see or believe you see should not be substituted for the truth of what is. On the flip-side, Dora is no different than the Lustful King she eventually marries - she desires wealth, title and sexual passions. When she receives youth, Dora traded Imma, who had been with her forever, for the man who had cast her to her death days before. This leads to Dora's condemnation to live the rest of her days alone and without Imma. For the Lustful King, he will never stop searching for his Queen who appeared to be the cure for his lustful addiction, when in fact, Dora was merely a reflection of himself that he could not see.

Cast

Production

Development

According to Matteo Garrone, he was drawn to Giambattista Basile's stories for their mix of the real and the unreal, and because he found the themes in many of them to still be highly relevant. Garrone had previously been best known for employing a naturalist style in films such as Gomorrah, but argued that all his previous films also have a fairytale aspect to their narratives.

Tale of Tales had a budget corresponding to USD$14.5 million.[2] It was produced through Garrone's company Archimede Film, with co-production support from France's Le Pact and Britain's Recorded Picture Company. It received financing from Rai Cinema and additional support from MiBACT and Eurimages.[8]

Filming

Principal photography commenced on 15 May 2014 and lasted four months.[8] The film was shot entirely on location in various parts of Italy, including Naples (Royal Palace, Palace of Capodimonte and its gardens); Apulia's Castel del Monte (octagonal castle appears in the poster near Vincent Cassel), Gioia del Colle (in particular the throne room), Laterza, Mottola, Statte; Sicily's Donnafugata Castle (gothic castle, stone labyrinth and gardens) and Gole dell'Alcantara in Alcantara (mainly scenes of sea dragon); Abruzzo's Castle of Roccascalegna (appears in the poster with Castel del Monte); Tuscany's Moorish castle of Sammezzano, the towns of Sorano and Sovana (tuff caves); and Lazio (Bosco del Sasseto in Viterbo).[9][10][11][12][13][14][15]

The team made an effort to find places that would remind the viewer of studio sets. Digital effects were artisanal integrations of something that had to look as believable as possible, in reference to images of heraldry or depictions of seventeenth-century landscapes.[2]

Release

Critical reception

The film received generally positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an 76% approval score based on reviews from 46 critics, with an average rating of 6.9 out of 10. The site's consensus states: "Visually splendid and narratively satisfying, Tale of Tales packs an off-kilter wallop for mature viewers in search of something different."[16] On Metacritic, the film has received a weighted average score of 73 out of 100 based on 17 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[17]

References

  1. ↑ "TALE OF TALES (15)". British Board of Film Classification. 27 April 2016. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 Vivarelli, Nick (15 May 2014). "Cannes: Italo Auteur Matteo Garrone Talks About His 'Tale of Tales' (Exclusive)". Variety. Retrieved 13 March 2015.
  3. ↑ "Tale of Tales (2016) - International Box Office Results". Box Office Mojo. Internet Movie Database. 24 April 2016. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  4. ↑ "2015 Official Selection". Cannes. Retrieved 16 April 2015.
  5. ↑ "Screenings Guide". Festival de Cannes. 6 May 2015. Retrieved 8 May 2015.
  6. ↑ "Cannes: How ‘Game of Thrones’ Influenced ‘Tale of Tales’". Retrieved 14 May 2015.
  7. 1 2 "Tale of Tales Movie Review". shockya.com.
  8. 1 2 Scarpa, Vittoria (16 May 2014). "Shooting kicks off for Tale of Tales by Matteo Garrone". Cineuropa. Retrieved 13 March 2015.
  9. ↑ "The Tales of Tales 4 things of Garrone's magical movie". SWIDE.
  10. ↑ "The Tale of Tales Official Trailer #1 2015, Cast, Released Date {2015} in France, Italy, UK, India". whatstheinfo.
  11. ↑ "Il Racconto dei Racconti: scelte le location del prossimo film di Matteo Garrone con Vincent Cassel e Salma Hayek protagonisti". bestmovie.it.
  12. ↑ "Garrone gira a Ragusa con un cast internazionale". La Repubblica.
  13. ↑ "Sul set con Garrone: "Il mio kolossal fantasy, a Castel del Monte con Vincent Cassel"". La Repubblica.
  14. ↑ "Il Racconto dei Racconti 2015". movieplayer.it.
  15. ↑ "Shooting kicks off for Tale of Tales by Matteo Garrone". cineuropa.org.
  16. ↑ "Il racconto dei racconti (Tale of Tales) (2015)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  17. ↑ "Tale of Tales Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 27 April 2016.

External links

  1. REDIRECTTemplate:Metacritic film
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