In “Tale of Tales,” one of two competition titles premiering on Day 1 of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, the sight of Salma Hayek in queenly Elizabethan garb, devouring a sea serpent’s bloody, boiled heart, suggests an Atkins diet for royals. It isn’t. Nor is it the stuff of grisly camp.
Rather, director and co-writer Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of 17th century Neopolitan fairy tales is a curious, stately and serenely convincing mixture of horrific violence, stylized just so, and sincere ensemble playing.
Give it up for Giambattista Basile, whose fantastic folkloric collection “Pentamerone” inspired Garrone’s film, Italian to its boots yet (oddly) shot in English with a rangy English-speaking cast from various countries.
Three kingdoms share the screen. In one, the queen (Hayek, striking in a newly sophisticated way here) can conceive a child only if her husband (John C. Reilly, in a glorified cameo) successfully kills a sea serpent and brings back the beating heart.
In another, droll Toby Jones plays a frivolous monarch who gives up his daughter to the local ogre. In the third tale, which intertwines gracefully with the other two, Vincent Cassel relishes the role of the horn-dog king (lotsa nudity in this segment) who falls in love with the singing voice of the crone down the lane. The woman’s desperate attempts to make herself more youthful and appealing to the king leads to Shakespearean-style “bed tricks” and some seriously ill-advised body mutilation in the name of eternal youth.
Garrone’s earlier films include the superb organized crime mosaic “Gomorrah” and “Reality,” a more conventional but gorgeously realized study in modern celebrity obsession. “Tale of Tales” will likely gain the director his largest international audience to date. For an hour or so it’s pretty stunning. This is a Grimm world of scary, oversized creatures, superbly rendered in a mixture of digital and practical magic, and of cursed, all-too-human decisions for which other people pay dearly.
The film’s rhythm grows a bit staid around the midpoint, but there’s enough at stake in each character’s dilemma to make the results stick, in their gooey, bloody way. In other words, there’s more than one beating heart at work in “Tale of Tales.”
“Pan’s Labyrinth” came to mind watching Garrone’s picture. This year’s main competition festival jury, headed by Joel and Ethan Coen, includes “Pan’s Labyrinth” mastermind Guillermo Del Toro. Surely he’ll be a supportive voice in the decision-making process 10 days from now.
