Tale of Tales (2015)

Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales is a triptych drawn from Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone, and it carries itself like a tapestry left in a damp castle: gorgeous, musty, and faintly hostile to the touch. Three kingdoms, three obsessions. A queen eats a sea dragon's heart to conceive. A king falls for a voice and discovers an old woman beneath it. Another king raises a flea to monstrous size and then bargains away his daughter to an ogre. The film has the patience of a folktale and the cruelty of one, too. It is not in a hurry to reassure anyone.

The stories circle women's appetites and women's costs: maternity, youth, beauty, the fear of being discarded. That material is real, and the film gives it weight. It does not, however, organize itself into a modern thesis. The gaze is grotesque, not corrective. Aging is treated as horror and farce, not as a lesson in self-acceptance. The cast is European, the courts are European, and the film never stops to explain its own demographics. There is no racial argument, no climate sermon, no economic parable about kings and their hoarded pleasures. The kings are simply kings, and the ogres are simply ogres.

Garrone's direction is stately and strange, with real locations doing the work of a studio dream. The result is a film of old fears and old punishments, told with a straight face. It has progressive undertones if you squint, mostly because it takes women's suffering seriously. But it never lectures. It never mounts a campaign. It sits on its throne, adjusts its crown, and lets the blood dry.