Day: December 10, 2015

LFM Reviews Tale of Tales @ The AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase

tale-of-tales-posterBy Joe Bendel. Neapolitan poet Giambattista Basile’s fairy tale collection predated Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, but despite their subtitle, “Entertainment for Little Ones,” they are considered idiosyncratically macabre and even a little NSFW. Of course, those are both rather cinematic qualities. Matteo Garrone duly emphasizes the strange and baroque in Tale of Tales, his English language adaptation of a trio of intertwined Basile fables, which screens as part of the AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase.

Three neighboring kingdoms largely coexist quite peacefully, because their respective monarchs are so self-absorbed with their own issues. Thanks to the help of a necromancer, the Queen of Longtrellis magically conceives the son she always desired, at the mere cost of her indulgent husband (and basically her soul). However, Prince Elias never adequately returns her codependent love. Instead, he prefers to spend time with the commoner Jonah, who is his exact spitting image.

The King of Highmountain is equally problematic in the completely opposite way. He ignores his antsy-to-be-married daughter, Princess Violet, preferring to obsess over his abnormally large trained flea. When he finally makes a show of arranging a contest for her hand, he inadvertently grants her hand to an ogre.

Meanwhile, the horndog King of Strongcliff has fallen in lust with the voice of the peasant Dora. However, he does not realize she is one of two old crone sisters living hand-to-mouth in a cottage on his estate. Feigning coyness, Dora manages to hold off the King until she can come to him under the dark of night. Complications ensue.

If you haven’t realized yet, there is sex in these fairy tales. There are also flashes of violence that are shocking in the moment, but not at all gratuitous. Be that as it may, it is easy to see why the archetypal source material has been largely passed over by animators and children’s publishers. Tale of Tales still seems likely an unlikely direction for an ultra-realist like Garrone, but he reportedly claims all his films have a kinship with fairy tales. You can sort of see that in a morality tale like Reality, but it is less apparent in the thinly fictionalized social expose, Gomorrah.

From "Tale of Tales."
From “Tale of Tales.”

Regardless, there is a lot of cool stuff in Tale, including Toby Jones talking to a giant flea and Salma Hayek eating a dragon’s heart. There are also tightrope walkers, damsels in distress, damsels causing distress, shapeshifters, and Shakespearean confusion with twins. Garrone and editor Marco Spoletini shrewdly time the shifts between narrative strands, maintaining a nice up-tempo pace. Alexandre Desplat also contributes a very Desplat-sounding score (classy, but not particularly distinctive). However, production designer Dimitri Capuani and the battery of art directors creates a richly detailed fantasy world that is both lovely and sinister.

Tale of Tales could be considered The Princess Bride’s evil twin, making it exactly the sort of fairy tale movie we have needed. It is much more fun than Catherine Breillart’s fairy tale films and more subversive than Snow White and the Huntsman. Recommended for fans of dark fantasy, Tale of Tales screens this Saturday (12/12) as part of the AFI’s EU Film Showcase.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on December 10th, 2015 at 1:00pm.

LFM Reviews The Magic Mountain @ The AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase

By Joe Bendel. Where could a mountaineering Polish dissident go to most effectively fight communism in the 1980s? Obviously Afghanistan. Of course, getting there was no easy feat and staying alive once he arrived was even trickier. However, the late Adam Jacek Winker was not easily dissuaded. Anca Damian tells his extraordinary story in the animated documentary The Magic Mountain, which screens as part of the AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase.

For Winker, opposing the spread of communism was a decidedly personal matter. His cousin and uncle were among those murdered by the Soviets at Katyn. He was able to get out of Poland while the getting was relatively good, but he also felt guilty about abandoning his homeland in a time of prolonged suffering. As a result, he was always looking for a way to take the fight back to the Soviets. While living in Paris, he was a bit of a gadfly, providing unwanted reality checks for the French communists’ Labor Day festivities, but he was truly called to Afghanistan.

Since Winker only had a French “refugee” passport, getting to Afghanistan, by way of Pakistan, was a complicated process. However, once there, Winker fell in with the mujahedeen relatively quickly. He had the extreme good fortune to join up with Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir,” an ardent foe of communism, who later rejected the Taliban’s oppressive fundamentalism just as vigorously. Alas, Mountain also serves as an elegy to the assassinated Massoud, as well as his somewhat eccentric Polish friend and comrade.

From "The Magic Mountain."
From “The Magic Mountain.”

Indeed, some the most poignant moments of Mountain focus on Winker’s efforts to promote and then memorialize the fallen Afghan hero. Yet, with respects to her central figure, Damian never descends into blinkered hagiography. Winker’s fault are readily identified, making him the stuff of classical tragedy, but viewers will understand where his zeal came from, and admire him for harnessing it.

Mountain incorporates archival photos of Winker and Massoud into the distinctive and diverse work of its team of animators and artists, including Theodore Ushev, Tomek Ducki, Matei Focsa Neagoe, Dan Panaitescu, and Raluca Popa. Frankly, a few sequences are almost excessively stylized to the point of self-defeating abstraction, but other visuals are absolutely arresting. Regardless, the film is always powered along by its sweepingly dramatic narrative.

Winker really was a character—a heroic character. He was also a principled individualist, who did not let his experiences in Afghanistan blind him to the dangers of Islamist ideology in his final years. Basically, he stayed on the right side of history, every step of the way, making his life story quite fascinating and instructive. Very highly recommended for fans of animation and biographical documentaries, The Magic Mountain screens this Saturday (12/12) as part of the AFI’s EU Film Showcase.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on December 10th, 2015 at 1:00pm.