This year the official competition of the Cannes Festival screened Tale of Tales, the eighth feature and English-language debut by Matteo Garrone. Garrone is one of Italy's most important filmmakers of the first decade of the 21st century, and this is the third film he made to be screened in the Cannes competition after Gomorrah, which won the Grand Prix in 2008, and Reality (2012). Unlike Garrone's previous films, especially Gomorrah – on the mafia – Tale of Tales presents an unrealistic form that is nonetheless about reality, recalling Roger Garaudy's “realism without shores”. It expresses a profound vision of the human condition in a delightfully surprising work of art. Garrone wrote the script with Edoardo Albinati, Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudioso based on three fairy tales from the Pentamerone by the 17th-century fabulist Giambattista Basile, whose better known tales – frequently drawn on for musical and dramatic works – include “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty”. At times the film recalls Fellini's world, presenting life as a circus, but Fellini's son and Basile's grandson makes his own kind of film. This is not a tale for children, and the world it presents is not so much a circus as reality and what lies above reality. Kings and paupers, people and beasts, dwarves and giants, instincts and inhibitions, what we see and know and what is hidden from our eyes and minds in the earth and the sea, good and evil, love and hate: such is the tale of tales. The script integrates the three tales in a firm dramatic structures, presenting the three nameless monarchs of three imaginary kingdoms. The king and queen of Selvascura or Longtrellis (John C. Reilly and Salma Hayek) are desperate to give birth to a crown prince. The king of Roccaforte or Strongcliff (Vincent Cassel) cannot control his sexual desires. And the king of Altomonte or Highhills (Toby Jones) is eager to find a husband for his daughter Viola (Bebe Cave). The first shot is of a seemingly supernatural soothsayer whose face we never see, but only its shadow on the ground of the outdoor court of the king of Selvascura's palace. He is telling the king and queen that she will bear a child if she eats the heart of the sea monster cooked by a virgin servant (who will herself bear the crown prince's twin). He also tells them that, for new life to emerge, old life must die – and the king pays with his life for the arrival of the twins, Prince Elias and the servant's son Jonah (played by Christian and Jonah Lees). The Roccaforte monarch, for his part, is enchanted by a beautiful voice emanating from a poor man's house, where he finds Dora (Hayley Carmichael and Stacy Martin) hidden in the pigsty. He does not see her till morning after he has sated his desire, when he discovers she is an ugly crone and throws her out of the window, but she clings to a branch and is transformed into a beautiful young woman by some supernatural being. The king spots her naked in the woods – and marries her. In Altomonte, meanwhile, the king develops an attachment to a flea that has bit him, rearing it in court until it grows to enormous size. When the giant flea dies the king makes it the centre of the test of winning his daughter's hand in marriage: the suitor who identifies its skin and thereby passes the test turns out to be the Ogre (Guillaume Delaunay), however, and Viola would rather kill herself than marry him... Garonne shot his film in wide-screen colour, the most appropriate format, choosing the sets with remarkable success – from the river in which the king dives to fish out the sea monster to the cave in which Viola lives with the Ogre. Peter Suschitzky's cinematography is a series of dreams and nightmares, and Alexandre Desplat is the heart and soul of the film. Casting and acting are top-notch throughout. This is particularly evident in the story of the twins, when the queen turns into a beast and tries to kill Jonah, only to be killed by an Elias unaware that she is his mother. The central scene remains the one in which the queen is calling after Elias in the royal maze, 16 years after his birth, when he escapes her and emerges out of the maze in the company of Jonah. Perhaps what prevents Tale of Tales from becoming one of world cinema's greatest masterpieces is the ending. In the story of the Roccaforte king, when Dora returns to her actual age, her equally old sister tries to repeat what happened to her while Viola manages to slaughter the Ogre. This turns the film in its final ten minutes into a kind of horror thriller which contradicts its style and vision. Yet the main technical problem is the factual, newsy dialogue, which brings the viewers down to earth every time they start hovering into imaginary skies. *** Screening outside the official competition is the Israeli filmmaker Elad Keidan's Afterthought, a French-Israeli production and Keidan's debut. Born in 1979 in Haifa – a fact evident in the film – Keidan won the Cannes's student film competition with Anthem in 2008, giving him the right to screen his debut at Cannes in the year of its production provided it is a good enough film. Afterthought is a good film, testimony to its director's talent and true auteur-ship, not only because he wrote the script but also because he employs a purely cinematic language and absorbs postmodernism from Jean-Luc Godard to Peter Greenaway. His debut is a pean to Haifa, city of Jews and Arabs – a centre of Arab Israelis – and holds much hope for peace after half a century of war. It is a formally classical film in a postmodern style, with no clear plot-line despite the unity of time, place and subject. The slow-paced action takes place over a single day, largely on the staircase overlooking the Mediterranean in the shadow of Mount Carmel in Haifa, and revolves around two Jewish men who seem to capture the character of the city: the middle-aged Moshe (Uri Klauzner) and the young Uri (Itay Tiran). Afterthought opens with a long panoramic shot showing the port and the mountain with the sounds of factories, construction, birds and morning radio: a beautiful document of the city's architecture. The soundtrack later features the call to prayer as well as Arabic and Hebrew conversation. As the two men's daily lives unfold Moshe is usually going up the stairs, Uri coming down. They intersect only once in the middle of the film, when we realise Moshe used to teach at Uri's school. Moshe, who rents out a merry-go-round to children, must replace his wife's lost earring. When he leaves the house he bumps into an Arab acquaintance and, as they talk, suggests building a museum of the Nakba along the lines of the Holocaust museum in Germany. At the shop Moshe shows the jeweller a picture of his wife putting on the other earring, and the jeweller informs him that this is the girlfriend of a famous television anchor, who bought the earrings for her. We never see him go back home. Uri is a young poet preparing to emigrate who throughout the film is receiving phone calls from the army spokeswoman calling him in for military training and wriggling out of the requirement to join the army, but when bureaucratic procedures prevent him from leaving the country he removes a brick of the staircase in his rage, then leaves. An Arab woman comes out of her house to replace the brick, and when Moshe sees her he goes over to help her. The film closes with the staircase as it was. *** Also screening outside the competition is Irrational Man by Woody Allen, who has refused to participate in any competition since his first film 1966, though he won several Oscars since the Academy does not require the approval of the director. Over four decades Woody Allen has become his own trademark, combining American with European schools of filmmaking, acting as well as writing and directing and lying somewhere between art house and commercial cinema. A prolific artist who nonetheless makes no artistic concessions, Woody Allen recalls Ingmar Bergman and Godard in their youth. At 79 he is as active as ever, producing a film every year, and perhaps like Manoel de Oliveira he will be making film till the age of 100. This is his 45th film, and though his first to be filmed in widescreen – an inappropriate format for a study of ennui – it is a lesson in the art of cinema, with Darius Khondji living up to the cinematographic challenge and Allen refereeing a brilliant acting match. Professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) is driving into a small town to begin a new teaching job, drinking out of a pocket flask and clearly depressed. Through a mixture of fact and fiction, rumours and reports, we begin to learn about this character whose mother killed herself, whose wife left him for his best friend and whose other friend died covering the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. In his youth Abe was a political activist eager to change the world, but in his first lecture he now tells the students that philosophy is like masturbation. Already he has caught the attention of his student Jill (Emma Stone), who is going out with fellow student Roy (Jamie Blackley), and his fellow professor Rita (Parker Posey), whose marriage is failing. Through his and Jill's narration we remain in the present in this setting. Abe is unable to perform sexually with Rita, who seduces him, and switches his attention to Jill, whom he keeps at a distance. When he overhears a woman at a restaurant complaining of a corrupt judge who colluded with her ex-husband to deprive her of her children, he decides to kill the judge – and his life changes instantly. He is able to perform with Jill as well as Rita now that life has taken on meaning again. It is in this scene that we see the only closeup of Abe's face, testifying to mastery of cinematic language. Abe manages to perform the perfect crime, in a reference to Fyodor Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, which has concerned Woody Allen on more than one occasion. But Jill discovers that he is the killer and, since the first crime always leads to a second, he tries to kill jill by throwing her into the elevator shaft – only to slip and fall himself. With all kinds of references to existential philosophy from Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger to Søren Kierkegaard the film is complicated and serious, but it is also a straightforward crime thriller about a murderer who is punished for his crime.
