Styled after the Baroque prose of Giambattista Basile's source material (a fairy tale precursor to the Grimm Brothers' Germanic work), Tale of Tales is a film of overwhelmingly florid artistry. Its look, all turrets and brocade, is the primary asset here, easily overshadowing the impressive international cast (Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, John C. Reilly), which Garrone fails to muster into any sort of believability, whatever that means in this fairytale framework.
Garrone's adaptation takes on just three of the fifty tales on offer and does away with the book's framing story. What's left (a clingy queen who endures loss to procure a son then smothers him at her peril, a king whose hubris and flea-love has terrible consequences for his daughter, and a randy ruler who latches onto a social climbing crone) kind of sits out there with its frilly arse bared to the elements, something Garrone and his screenplay collaborators don't seem that bothered by. They pitch for a unifying look at self-centeredness but only come up with unnecessarily episodic convolution. A couple more passes through The Decameron or Arabian Nights may have helped to overcome all that.
There's thrill in the visuals here, and in Garrone's bloodthirsty selfishness but as much as Tale of Tales excites the eye, its simplicity irritates the brain. The trade off doesn't work for me.
★★
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