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For a while Tale of Tales plays out with the free-associative logic of a fairy tale and provides sequences that in an American film would lead to bombast with quiet emotional urgency. This is when the film is operating at its best, but then a certain thinness begins to undermine the film’s triptych of stories and their corresponding images. That is, the film runs out of gas long before the final credits are rolling.
The three tales told here are eventually revealed as being interwoven in intimate and unique ways, but the crosscutting between them feels arbitrary at best. At its worst, the stories intrude all over each other’s emotional rhythms and textures, and I wonder if this could be reedited to have the films work more in concert with each other. There are clear parallels in story beats or characters dropping in to work as a smoother connective tissue.
Eventually the blood splattering and bare breasts, the aggressive carnality and contrasting imagery begins to feel repetitive instead of how invigorating and unique it was in the opening scenes. After all, casting Vincent Cassel as a randy king that blasts through all of the maidens in his kingdom is a bit of type-casting begging for a reframing, but that never happens here. While Salma Hayek’s queen with baby-fever is one of the better, more realized creations in the film. Hayek’s fantastic in the role even if the eventual story beats squander her investment and misguided maternal instincts.
There’s still plenty to celebrate about Tale of Tales, especially its masterful first half, and it’s great to see a fairy-tale film that doesn’t want to wrap its fantastical elements around big CGI battles and frantic editing in the final act. There are several unique ideas about patriarchy, femininity and neurotic relationships between royals and their subjects to chew on, mainly the tale of two sisters obsessed with regaining their youth. The horror and sexuality of fairy tales is alive and well in Tale of Tales even if it can’t stick the landing.
