Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales is fabulous in every sense: a freaky portmanteau film based on the folk myths collected and published by the 16th-century Neapolitan poet and scholar Giambattista Basile – Garrone worked on the adaptation with Edoardo Albinati, Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudioso.

It is gloriously mad, rigorously imagined, visually wonderful: erotic, hilarious and internally consistent. The sort of film, in fact, which is the whole point of Cannes. It immerses you in a complete created world. Ovid is mulched in with Hansel, Gretel, the Beauty, the Beast, the Prince, the Pauper, in no real order. At times, Garrone seemed to have taken inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s own fabular tale The Mystery of Oberwald – at others, it felt like he had deeply inhaled the strange and unwholesome odour still emanating from Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales. But there’s also a bit of John Boorman’s Excalibur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Blackadder, The Company of Wolves, the Tenniel illustrations for Alice in Wonderland… and Shrek.

Vincent Cassel and Stacy Martin in Tale of Tales.



Yet perhaps it is more that all these things are analogues rather than sources, and that Garrone’s film just participates in that general anti-rational, anti-Enlightenment tradition of weirdness and gracefully surrendering – in one’s dreams – to something sinister and sensual. Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods never managed anything like as creepy.

It is basically an alignment of three neighbouring kingdoms. In one, Selvascura, a careworn king and queen played by John C Reilly and Salma Hayek, are tormented by their lack of children. A soothsayer tells them that killing a monster in a lake will cure their problem, in tandem with a ritual involving a virgin among their servant staff. It results in the birth of weirdly matching albino twins, one for the queen, one for the servant.

Salma Hayek in Tale of Tales.

Meanwhile, in the adjoining principality of Roccaforte, Vincent Cassel plays a hideously corrupt, epicurean and sex-addicted monarch who becomes entranced by the singing voice of an aged crone, Dora (played successively by Hayley Carmichael and Stacy Martin) hidden in her murky pigsty. He mistakes her for a comely young maiden. She agrees to have sex with him under cover of darkness and when, the next morning, he lets daylight in upon magic – to coin a phrase – a nightmare ensues.

Thirdly, there is the eccentric King of Altomonte, superbly played by Toby Jones, who picks a flea off his arm and nurtures it under his bed until it grows to the size of a Fiat Uno. Quite clearly caring more for his giant flea than he does for his own daughter, he makes his mega-flea the centrepiece of a ritualistic test for any suitor who wishes to marry his daughter Viola (Bebe Cave) – with horrendous results.

It is a masterpiece of black-comic bad taste and a positive carnival of transgression. The secret is the deadpan seriousness with which everything is treated. More or less everyone has the expression of severity that Anthony Quayle had, playing the king in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted To Know – as he scowls at Allen’s jester, calling him “not funny”. The tone is set by John C Reilly at the beginning as he prepares to do battle with his sea monster, climbing into armour which is more that of a deep-sea diver.

Nothing in Garrone’s previous films Gomorrah and Reality prepared me for this adventure, although those movies were themselves galleries of grotesques, themselves scarcely believable. Tale of Tales is a treat: surely in line for a major prize here, and Toby Jones has to be in with a chance of best actor for his conceited, melancholy, ridiculous king.