Munching on a giant, anatomically correct heart was part of the peculiar challenge of working with Gomorrah film director Matteo Garrone, said actor Salma Hayek at the Cannes film festival.
Hayek plays a queen desperate for a child in Garrone’s Tale of Tales, a fairytale portmanteau film based on a collection of stories by the 17th-century Neapolitan scholar Giambattista Basile. To become pregnant, the queen is told she must eat the heart of a sea monster that has been boiled and served by a virgin.
“The heart tasted disgusting,” said Hayek. “He [Garrone] wanted it to look exactly like a real heart inside, so a doctor would recognise what I was eating. “It was [made of] pasta, candy – all kinds of disgusting things,” she said. “I was gagging.”
Basile’s stories, written in the 1630s, influenced the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. His writing spins macabre tales of sex-crazed monarchs, feckless parents and women obsessed with beauty that still ring true today, said Garrone, who is making his English-language debut with Tale of Tales.
“[Basile’s] unknown and it’s unfair,” he said. “He was the first person to write tales like Puss in Boots and Cinderella. He wrote archetypes that remain very topical.”
Toby Jones, who critics suggest could be in the running for Cannes’s best actor prize for playing a king who transfers his affections from his teenage daughter to a flea, agreed that there were universal themes. “[There’s the] complexity of feeling that comes with a daughter growing up. The departure of a child, which is a reminder of ageing. The idea that ageing is often infantalising,” he said.
Tale of Tales, which will premiere in Cannes on 14 May, has found a fairy godmother in the press at the festival. The Guardian’s critic, Peter Bradshaw, called Garrone’s film “fabulous in every sense” in his five-star review. The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin called the film “extra mad” and said Garrone’s latest “dances on a razor’s edge between funny and unnerving”.
The film, a big-budget project with CGI flourishes, is a departure for Garrone. Gomorrah, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2008, explored the inner workings of the mob in and around Naples. Reality, his satire on the reality TV boom, premiered in competition here in 2012.
