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| Tale of Tales movie poster |
By Lucian
Just about everyone is familiar with fairy tales and most of us know their origins are very old. Modern versions of these tales can be very different from the older ones, and few realize just how many variations these stories once had. The brothers Grimm compiled the stories in what is now Germany, and their versions became a literary standard, although even these versions have been further edited and modified to become the fairy tales we know and love today.
The tales recorded by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm are often darker in nature than the versions most people are familiar with, leading people to speculate that their name was the basis for the modern English word “grim,” which means uninviting, depressing or harsh. The connection is coincidental, but meaningful. The term “grim” did not derive from the surname “Grimm,” but both share a common etymology, and derive from the Old English or Old High German word for “fierce.” The older versions of fairy tales were often cautionary tales, and as such did not have happy endings.
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Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), published in 1812 by the brothers Grimm is where the average person stops when looking into the history of a fairy tale, but their work was far from the beginning, and many other variants of those stories existed in their time and before it. Approximately 175 years before their first edition, in the 1630s, a Neapolitan poet and courtier named Giambattista Basile compiled and connected the stories of many fairy tales in his work Lo cunto de li cunti (called the Pentamerone in Italian). The brothers Grimm referenced it for material and, in the third edition of their own book, praised Basile and acknowledged his influence on their work.
In 2015, Matteo Garrone directed a film called Tale of Tales (Il racconto dei racconti) based on the work of Giambattista Basile. The film stars Vincent Cassel, Salma Hayek, Toby Jones, John C. Reilly, Hayley Carmichael, Shirley Henderson, Jessie Cave, Christian Lees and Jonah Lees. As with many movie adaptations, only a portion of the book was represented and there were inevitable changes made. To try to include it all simply wouldn’t be practical. The DVD was released in the fall of 2016.
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The film was fascinating, but disturbing, and while I feel today’s children are sheltered too much from harsh realities, the imagery in Tale of Tales was certainly not for children. One could ask why, with modern horror films and gruesome special effects, I would find this movie disturbing. It was not because I expected a sanitized version of our ancient or traditional fairy tales, it is because the stories brought with them ethical dilemmas and moral conundrums that are not pleasant to think about. The movie is based on stories that occur in a fairy tale setting, but expresses the complexity and sometimes dire consequences of decision making in a way that a Walt Disney movie never could. For example: Is it right to help a stranger? It can be, but what if the action puts your own family in peril? Does obligation to your family supersede personal altruism? Is it right to help someone if it imperils another innocent? What appears to be a simple question, when honestly examined, is not simple at all. The more I think about the movie, the more questions like this arise, even from what at first seemed like insignificant details.
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The fantastic castles and other scenery in the film were real places in Italy, and most were in the south. These included the Neapolitan Palazzo Reale di Napoli and the Palazzo Reale di Capodimonte, Apulia’s Castel del Monte, and Sicily’s Castello di Donnafugata. My personal favorites were Abruzzo’s Castello di Roccascalenga and its cliffs, and the Gole dell'Alcantara in Sicily where they filmed the scene of the King and the sea dragon.
Anyone interested in the older, less sanitized versions of fairy tales, or in the beautiful places that this movie was filmed, should definitely take the time to watch it.
