Critics reviews

There are giant animatronic beasts and ogres and flayings and all manner of comeuppance, and it's all presented with a narrative modesty that belies the opulence on screen. It's wonderful. Stories like these endure because they're imminently tellable, and Garrone has told the heck out of them.

Reacting to the film's premiere at last year's Cannes, some complained that its three tales were artlessly tossed together. I can't agree; for me, the film's open weaver is an evocation of the orla tradition wherein all fairytales have their beginnings. There is something conversational, suitably pedestrian, about Garrone's loose, informal structure.

Love and family are astonishing letdowns for all concerned. With a focus on corporeal gore and psychological realism, Tale of Tales attempts to re-Grimmify the fairy tale, rather than fracture or deconstruct it à la the sly Into the Woods or The Princess Bride. The result is a film that doesn't wink at the viewer as much as stare aghast at the self-interested evil that humans do.

Like the blandly designed, generally indistinguishable castles in which its stories are set, the film suggests a large outlay of funds frittered away on a white elephant slab of textureless whimsy, with little sense of how to transform its budget into something emotionally expansive or genuinely fantastical. Instead, it offers the spectacle of another director of reliable mid-tier art-house entertainments floundering in an expensive new venue.

Taken as a whole, it's difficult to pin down exactly what Tale of Tales is trying to accomplish, other than presenting a handsomely mounted fairy tale. And even that is a stretch at times. The elaborate costumes and makeup design look impressive, but the production values (especially anything involving CGI composite shots) appear cheap and televisual.

This all should be very eye-popping, and much of it is. What it is not, unfortunately, is particularly involving. This is Garrone's first English-language film, and while it's plain that such an ornate production as this is best financed with the English-language market in mind, the compromise of cultural specificity also yields a gnawing banality.

This is definitely a fairytale for grown-ups: It simmers with a mad, vibrating erotic energy, and its color palette, opulent and dusty at once, might be summed up as faded red-and-gilt boudoir... All fairytales have hidden meanings and motives, expressing everything from repressed desire to frustration with societal norms. There are doubtless hundreds of hidden archetypal complexities in Tale of Tales—but to bask in its weird, warped beauty is pleasure enough.

Garrone doesn't blow his budget on photo-realistic effects; he succeeds in conjuring a magical *feeling*, whether by exploiting the wonders of an octagonal castle, creating actual creatures for the sea monster and the lamb-sized flea, or staging human metamorphoses with stunning simplicity. He makes you feel as if you've stepped into a world where fickle gods play crack-the-whip with man's—and woman's—fate.

Garrone, best known for the gangster film Gomorrah, deserves credit for preserving the sui generis weirdness of fairy tales, naïve and grotesque in equal measure, despite his tin ear for English. But this is one of those cases where a movie is ornamented by its defects. Garrone's undiscriminating direction of the cast, none of whom appear to be acting in the same movie, textures the film with mismatched accents, somehow adding to its macabre humor and overall strangeness.

At times, the horrific eclipses the merely eccentric as necks are sliced and broken, skin is glued and flayed, and bodies are tossed from great heights... Sights like these give "Tale of Tales" its lustful heart and carnival soul, best distilled in the barmy lewdness of a scene in which Mr. Cassel's king blissfully sucks a shy maiden's digit through a wooden door. Finger-licking good, indeed.

Several moments in Tale of Tales exude primordial power, laced with a dry absurdism that unexpectedly gives way to tenderness (particularly in a story that's driven in part by another king's affection for a flea, which he nurses until it reaches monstrous dimensions). Eventually, though, Garrone's self-consciously patchwork, one-thing-after-another structure wears thin.

Like last year's WILD TALES, Matteo Garrone's TALE OF TALES is a film that revels in the art of storytelling, weaving together the parallels of four narratives that are unified in their extreme outlandishness. Unlike the accelerated pace of that film, however, Garrone's vision is intentionally meandering and dreamlike... Spinning a complex narrative involving strange twists of fate and tragedies amongst the ruling class, TALE OF TALES plays like a particularly macabre episode of Game of Thrones.