Tale of Tales (2015 film)
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Matteo Garrone |
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Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile |
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| Music by | Alexandre Desplat |
| Cinematography | Peter Suschitzky |
| Edited by | Marco Spoletini |
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Release date
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Running time
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134 minutes |
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| Language | English |
| Budget | $14.5 million |
Tale of Tales (Italian: Il racconto dei racconti) is a 2015 European dark fantasy film, directed by Matteo Garrone, starring Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, and John C. Reilly.
An Italian-led production with co-producers in France and the United Kingdom, the film is Garrone's first English-language film. It competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
It is a screen adaptation based on collections of tales by Neapolitan poet and courtier Giambattista Basile: Pentamerone or Lo cunto de li cunti (Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones), which contains the earliest versions of famous fables like Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.
The Baroque stories manage to mix real and surreal with many metaphorical usages. Pentamerone was a 17th-century collection of Italian fairytales.
The three tales are La Cerva Fatata (The Enchanted Doe), La Pulce (The Flea), La Vecchia Scorticata (The Flayed Old Lady), that have been freely adapted with elements of other tales by Giambattista Basile, as well as a touch of artistic license. All three stories are told in a mixed way, pieced in fragments through the whole film until the end, when they conflate to a common point just before the film finishes.
The first tale begins in the kingdom of Longtrellis, where the King and Queen have tried everything to have a child, but are not successful. The King loves his Queen, but all she desires is a child. One night, a necromancer suggests a risky solution: if the Queen eats the heart of an aquatic dragon cooked by a virgin, she will instantly become with child. However, this will come at the cost of a life. The Queen accepts, not caring about the price. The King sets off to slay the aquatic dragon, and dies doing so. The Queen does not mourn the loss of her husband; she only cares for the dragon's heart. After eating the heart, the queen bears a son, Elias, in one day's time. The servant who cooked the heart for the Queen, who accidentally became pregnant by inhaling the steam from the heart, also gives birth to a boy, Jonah. The two boys are nearly identical and have hair as white as the dragon.
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Wikipedia