WHAT TO EXPECT: TALE OF TALES
Matteo Garrone, the same director who made the graphic and telling Gomorrah crime film in 2008, is now hard at work on Tale of Tales, a fantasy film based on Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone. Production is taking place in various locations around Italy, and the cast reportedly includes A-listers John C. Reilly, Vincent Cassel, and Salma Hayek.
First published between 1634 and 1636, The Pentamerone, also known as The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones, is one of the earliest written collection of fairytales and one of the source texts for the Brothers Grimm. Its author Basile was a Neapolitan soldier, courtier, and poet who was influenced by Italian oral folktales and elements of his own adventures. New Sparta Films released a statement saying the film is a “fantastic journey through the Baroque era”. What else can we expect from Garrone’s interpretation?
1. Dark Fantasy
Giambattista Basile’s tales are full of magic and funny moments, but there are also a few stories with dark and disturbing themes. Sun, Moon, and Talia (an early version of Sleeping Beauty) casually depicts the sexual assault of a slumbering princess, Penta with the Chopped-off Hands details the incestuous intentions of a king, and The Myrtle illustrates the violent murder and dismembering of a fairy princess. Garrone might not try to recreate these particularly explicit scenes, but it’s not inconceivable to think that his film would explore the corruptive and decadent aspects of the human psyche within the larger background of Southern Italy in the seventeenth century. At the time, Naples was full of elite literati but it also had its fair share of revolts, superstitions, religious upheavals, feudalistic petty nobles, wandering bandits, and disease. Perhaps this is why Garrone revealed in a recent Variety interview that he conceives of his movie as a “fantasy film with horror elements”.
2. On-Location Wonders
Basile’s fables often unfold in crystal tunnels, subterranean palaces, enchanted woods, or among families of ogres. Garrone’s scouting team is maintaining Basile’s aesthetic of mystique by using offbeat locations in rural Italy for the film sets. So far the cast and crew have been spotted at places such as Castello Sammezano, Castel del Monte in Apulia, the spooky Bosco del Sasseto near Torre Alfina in Viterbo, and the Etruscan Necropolis and network of ruined roads in Sovana and Sorano.
3. Neapolitan Early Modern culture
The film will be made in English, but that doesn’t mean Garrone will leave out all the Neapolitan colloquialisms and vernacular cultures which originally made Basile’s work famous in the first place. One of the most hilarious verbal exchanges takes place in the first chapter of The Pentamerone, when an old woman and young boy level insults at each other:
One day while Zoza was sitting at the window as sourly as a pickle an old woman chanced to pass by. She began to fill a jar she had brought with her, sopping up the oil with a sponge, and as she was busily going about her task a certain devil of a court page threw a stone at her with such precision that it hit the jar and broke to pieces.
The old woman, who Basile reminds the reader, “let no one ride on her back” then gives the prankster a piece of her mind :
Ah you worthless thing, you dope, shithead, bed pisser, leaping goat, diaper ass, hangman’s noose, bastard mule! Just look even fleas can cough now! Go on, may paralysis seize you, may your mother get bad news, may you not live to see the first of May!…Scoundrel, beggar, son of a taxed woman, rogue!
The boy counters with:
Why don’t you shut that sewer hole, you bogeyman’s grandmother, blood-sucking witch, baby drowner, rag shitter, fart gatherer?
The old woman then responds by lifting up her skirt and revealing her “woodsy scene”.
Garrone might not take the obscenities that far, but his other Neapolitan films have featured bawdy dialogue and it’s possible that he might attempt to retain some level of plain-speech and traditional Campanian humour in Tale of Tales.
If you’d like to catch up on Basile’s Pentamerone before the movie comes out in 2015, pick up the most recent translation by Nancy Canepa.