Tale of Tales - Review

Il Racconto dei Racconti / Tale of Tales, dir. Matteo Garrone, Italy, 2015 - 68e Festival De Cannes Competition 

Martin I. Petrov

A composition of stories we’ve heard and fruitful thoughts of fairytale dreams - in the Tale of Tales, Matteo Garrone gets something new, something old and something borrowed in an attempt to create an adventurous epos. 

The Italian director of Gomorrah and Reality returns to the Croisette, this year in Competition with Il Racconto dei Racconti, a visionary, well-polished fairytale, which seems more of a puzzle of compiled traditional tales, told from the phantasmagoric perspective of a blockbuster-esque storyteller. 

We are introduced to three parallel stories for kings and queens and so much different from one another kingdoms. 

A powerful and possessive queen is tortured by the inability to give her husband a child. When the palace’s magician reveals that only by eating the heart of the water monster cooked by a virgin would impregnate her, the king sacrifices himself, but manages to kill the beast and gift its heart to his beloved one. But the queen isn't the only one who gives birth in the castle the following day, with spell being casted upon the poor virgin servant as well. 

In a far more bizarre and meaningless kingdom, a middle aged king, desperately looking for a wife, becomes obsessed with a woman he’s never seen before, but only to discover that she is an old made living with her sister. After throwing her in the forest wrapped in red velvet sheets, a forest elf rejuvenates her. Enchanted by her beauty, the king marries the young girl. 

In a tale much more conventional, a king lives with his daughter, who seeks a husband to take her away from the castle. When the king announces a competition, his young daughter is forced to accept as a husband a savage, monstrous caveman. The tale of “Beauty and the beast” with a raw, medieval interpretation and probably the weakest of the three stories in the film, gives a faded background to the other two. 

Garrone’s intention to tangle and stir fairytales and imagination, ends up being an endless wishy-washy compilation, with a sense of confusion and repetitiveness. It’s like Garrone scooped all his childhood memories in one film, in the process of which he tries to remember how the story should go on or end. 

The par aestheticism of the film compensate partly for the storyline, but cannot buy the attention after the first hour, especially when the three parallel tales miss a connecting point. Tale of Tales throws a promising opening, with humorous and fast pace, but soon it evolves into a stiff, predictable and Hollywood-like anecdote. A top-billed cast including Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, John C. Reilly and Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Stacy Martin doesn’t contribute much to Tale of Tales’ resemblance to not so successful new millennium fairytales like the Brothers Grimm or Red Riding Hood. 

With conceptual potential, Il Racconto dei Racconti misses a bond that would keep the story together and give, if not linear, at least a more coherent narrative. Perhaps, keeping a thoroughly adult storytelling would make the film more eye-catching, instead of stepping on well known stories that have already been told well enough.