TALE OF TALES

Matteo Garrone hangs a sharp right from quasi-docu-realist Mafia dramas into seventeenth century Italian fantasy horror with his new portmanteau film TALE OF TALES.  The movie is based on three tales collected by Giambattista Basile - tales that went on to inspire the Grimms and Hans Christian Anderson two centuries later.  But rather than give us the familiar precursors to Cinderella or Puss In Boots we get three tales of weird unfamiliarity and satisfyingly gruesome meaning.

In the first, Salma Hayek plays a queen desperate to bear a child no matter what the cost of trusting a malevolent wizard.  The poster art of this film shows one of its most memorable visuals - Hayek eating a giant bloody sea-monster's heart in a stunningly ornate white room.  But this story is full of arresting visuals - from John C Reilly's king in a diving suit battling the monster, to two albino twins escaping under that same sea.  For the Queen never truly realises what the wizard tells her - that every life and every action is bought at a price, and that the closer one tries to force love, the further it slips away.

London Film Fest 2012 - Top Picks - REALITY

Our latest top pick for this year's London Film Festival also makes it onto our Best of 2012 list - an hilarious, absurd and yet haunting comedy about our obsession with reality TV from the director behind the mafia documentary GOMORRAH, Matteo Garrone.  REALITY has three showings at the London Film Fest, and tickets are still available for two.  Check out the BFI website for more information.

REALITY is an astounding and disturbing film - equally funny and provocative - finding a delicate balance between the absurd and the tragic. Set in contemporary Naples, the movie opens with a bravura  aerial/tracking shot that sees a gaudy, glitzy golden carriage carry a bride and groom into a wedding ceremony of lurid grandeur.  Alexandre Desplat's score has some of the mischief and fairytale madness of Danny Elfman's Tim Burton soundtracks, and the deliberate framing and wonderfully mobile cinematography lend the scene an energy and vivacity. The director is evidently captivated by his grotesques, eschewing any kind of patronising sneering at these Italian chavs.  The whole thing is crazy, faintly disturbing, but somehow alluring.

The wedding guests go wild for the star attraction - a recent winner of Big Brother - and this adulation sparks the envy, admiration and almost childlike awe of local fishmonger and small-time scam-artist, Luciano.  He is a simple, warm-hearted man whose love for his children allows us to forgive him the comedic absurdity of dragging an old woman from Mass.  After all, in working class Naples, everyone's running a scam, and this movie is at its best when it captures the everyday corruption, the warmth of families living in cramped, cruddy conditions - a city so rotten that its masonry is crumbling - a city that's so much fun we luxuriate in its larger-than-life characters and long-standing friendships.  The first hour of REALITY is filled with these beautifully choreographed, effervescent family tableaux.

As we move into the second hour of the film, the film becomes tragicomic as Luciano's dream of becoming a contestant on Big Brother comes rather close to reality - he even gets to go to Cinecitta in Rome for an audition.  But this glimmer of hope is fanned into a kind of madness as he starts to believe that casual passers-by are vetting him as a potential contestant. The movie subtly raises interesting parallels between traditional and contemporary Italian, if not western, society.  In generations past, our moral codes had a religious imperative - we did good, if we did at all, partly because we feared an omniscient and omnipresent god was policing us.  By contrast, Luciano does good because he thinks he is being vetted. Big Brother is always watching, and is the beatific calm that Luciano experiences in his good works any less valid?  The movie gives a clear answer.  The disturbing near maniacal laughing and insane isolation at the end of the film - the fact that we are not prosecuted by, but desirous of Big Brother's ever-open eye - the subtle contrast of a Cinecitta used to film shoddy reality shows with the august history we cinephiles know it has....This is a movie about decadence - moral, material, and finally mental.

It made me laugh. And then it didn't.

REALITY played Cannes, where it won the Grand Prize of the Jury, and London 2012.  It is currently on release in Italy and France and opens on October 11th in Russia; on October 25th in Portugal; and on November 7th in Belgium and the Netherlands. 

Running time: 115 minutes. Language: Italian.

GOMORRA - I'd rather have watched a doc

Man, I know I'm going to come off all Neanderthal in this review, but I got bored silly during GOMORRA. I know it's meant to be a superlative tour-de-force depiction of modern-day Italian mafia - grimy and honest rather than glorying in violence. I know that the director deliberately avoids a straight-forward plot - and wants to give a more realistic patchwork of realistic stories. I know that we are meant to work hard and discern the spider's web of insidious corruption as small boys become drug runners and old men dump toxic waste in quarries. But quite frankly, this movie tells us nothing we don't already know. Admittedly  it tells us what we know in a manner that is down and dirty and grimy and gritty and that's interesting for about an hour and a half. But after that? Snooze a-go-go. So call me superficial. I'd rather read the book. In other words if you want to make a film that's deliberately alienating in order to capture a sort of hands-off, non-melodramatic, documentary feel, then frankly I'd rather watch a doc or read a book. I'm not sure if form and content are aligned here. Of course, other critics are praising the film-makers precisely for neutering the narrative fiction film, but why? I just don't get it.

GOMORRA played Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix, and Toronto 2008. It opened earlier this year in Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Portugal. It is currently on release in Denmark, Norway and the UK. It opens in the Netherlands on January 29th.