In the ‘extras’ on the DVD of Matteo
Garrone’s film Tale of Tales Toby Jones is asked why he wanted to be in the
movie. Of course he was excited to
work with the director of Gamorrah, the impressive realist Italian Mafia
movie. Add in the challenge of a script adapted
from 17th century Italian folk tales
and the pleasure of working with Salma Hayek and Vincent Cassel and of course he was
keen. But I wonder if the question comes
back to haunt him now.
I admit that
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian is quoted on the DVD cover saying it is a “visual delight…fabulous in every sense” but of course we do not know the context from which these seven words were
lifted, or what else he said about it.
And it is a visual delight, shot by Peter Suschitzky who did splendid
work on Star Wars; The Empire Strikes
Back, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and Mars Attacks. The score is
by Alexandre Desplat, so much in demand that I see there have been fifteen scores from
him this year, plus those to The Danish
Girl, Suffragette, The Imitation Game, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Tree of Life and Zero Dark Thirty. In fact he has scored fourteen of my favorite
films of the last twelve years. But
this is not one of them.
It is fabulous, but only in the
sense of being absurd and based in fables. Sadly the three stories interwoven here are neither funny nor
instructive. Giambattista Basile wrote
them down at about the same time that Shakespeare was working, but he was not a
Shakespeare, a Perrault nor a Grimm brother.
(Basile is sometimes credited with an early version of Cinderella, or
Cenorentola, but as Marina Warner tells
us in her authoritative From the Beast to The Blonde there is an early second century tale in which a virgin’s sandal is carried
off by an eagle as she is bathing and dropped at the feet of the Pharoah, who vows to find her and scours
the country to make her his wife. It was
also written down in 9th century China and has been told and changed
through many different cultures and centuries. )
The
cast do their best with a banal script and try to invest their characters with
some depth or interest. Toby Jones,
bless him, seems to work the hardest, but I had no sympathy for any of
them.
I applaud Garrone for not trying to repeat
his Gommorah, and wanting to do
something radically different, as he also did in his 2012 comedy drama Reality, and I will look out for his
next film, but this DVD goes on my reject pile.
