Review of Tale of Tales (2015) by Vincenzo P — 30 Jun 2016

Matteo Garrone demonstrates that it is possible to make a stunning fantasy movie which is not set in the Middle Ages and which is does not cost more than $15 millions (the whole movie, which looks spectacularly good and is not the usual carnival of silly CGIs costed $14.

5 millions; compare it, for example, with the disgraceful Alice Through the Looking Glass, which costed $170 millions, did not look as good as Garrone's movie and is just a bad movie overall). Matteo Garrone also goes to the origins of the modern fairytales.

The three stories of Tale of Tales, in fact, are based on three of the fairytales contained in Giambattista Basile's book of the same title, written in the XVII century in the Naples dialect (a dialect so dissimilar from official Italian which can be considered as a language on its own).

Long before they were re-written and edulcorated by the Grimm brothers, fairytales such as Cinderella or the Sleeping Beauty had been told by Basile. These fairytales were often much darker and horrific than how we are used to think about them nowadays.

But, for Basile, they contained some important moral elements. Garrone manages to capture both the dark and the comic aspects of Basile's fairytales and exhibit their moral message. Often, this moral message is something that the viewer of the movie (or the reader of the fairytales) has to think about and figure out by himself.

Does loving someone imply the desire of his happiness? Is it always right to follow and apply the rules? Can we ever be happy for the other people's fortune? Garrone asks these questions amidst colours, drama, horror and great comical moments.

The ending does not seem really like an ending, but perhaps fairytales did not end with "and they lived happily ever after" originally. Perhaps, they ended with "and they lived", and we will never know what else happened in the life of these immortal characters.