Fairy-tale plots, like dreams, should not be interpreted literally – as descriptions of events – but symbolically, as metaphorical narratives about journeys, adventures, transformations, and the evolution of the soul.
If you take Matteo Garrone’s film Tale of Tales literally, you see grotesque, at times outright delusional fantasy stories about mentally ill people and their absurd attempts to live out their pitiful lives. In short: madness and filth. But if you view Tale of Tales as a drama about the inner world, played out through symbolic imagery, it transforms into a gripping psychological thriller. Let me offer my interpretation from this perspective.
First Story: A Woman Obsessed with Motherhood and the Fractured Soul of a Child
We see a beautiful queen (Salma Hayek brilliantly conveys the nuances of her character’s emotions), whose thoughts and feelings revolve around one thing: she wants a child. She has a good, caring, and attentive king for a husband, and an entire kingdom at her service, but the world means nothing to her without a “little doll.” A sorcerer appears, offering her a magical form of artificial insemination, but warns her of the side effects: the world operates on balance, and every life must be paid for with a death. The queen, of course, is undeterred (what could stop a woman who passionately desires something?). The king sets out to retrieve the heart of a sea monster and, after completing this horrific mission, dies from his wounds. Without shedding a single tear, the ungrateful queen takes the heart and returns to the castle.
Doesn’t this perfectly describe the dynamics of some family relationships? If a woman rejects all female roles except that of a mother, she doesn’t need a husband – she only needs him to provide what allows her to give birth. After that, she symbolically sends him to his death (excludes him from the family) – he would only get in the way and interfere with her boundless maternal love.
Next, according to the Italian fairy-tale version, the actual fertilization occurs when the queen eats the monster’s heart. However, a virgin maidservant, who was cooking the heart, inhales the steam from the broth and also becomes pregnant. By evening, the kingdom welcomes two baby boys – twins (Johnny Depp’s editing condenses nine months into half a day). At her husband’s funeral, the queen is utterly indifferent to the proceedings – she is completely absorbed in caring for her newborn. Fifteen years later, we see the boy as a teenager, and the mother, overflowing with adoration and delight, chases after him through a labyrinth. The boy is clearly burdened by this love (as any normal but over-loved child would be), especially since he has a twin brother, the son of the chaste maidservant, with whom it’s far more interesting to escape the palace and swim along the ocean floor – the genes of the sea monster are making themselves known.
We see the boy walking along the riverbed with his brother, as if they are one whole – two parts of a single soul. And we see the queen-mother, lost, standing in the middle of an empty labyrinth. There is nothing valuable in her life except her beloved son; her soul, like these labyrinth corridors, is tangled but empty.
The queen scolds her son for his “inappropriate connection with a commoner,” threatens to banish his “ugly” brother along with his mother, and it becomes increasingly clear that her love for her son resembles obsessive infatuation.
This hypertrophied, fixated-on-one-object maternal love is tinged with incestuous overtones – so sensually does she offer to help her son put on his earrings that the audience recoils in disgust.
It also becomes clear that this love is selfish, as the mother rejects her son’s important attachment to his brother.
This symbolically plays out the drama of a fractured child’s soul – when a mother accepts only “half” of the child (the good half – the successful, beautiful, obedient one – take your pick), while rejecting the other half of his identity (the unsuccessful, unattractive, disobedient one), threatening to banish or even destroy it.
Fearing for his life, the cook’s son leaves the palace, and we realize that the prince remains deeply unhappy.
No one can be happy when an important part of themselves is unrecognized, condemned, and exiled.
But can the queen be called happy? It’s obvious how much she fears losing her “good” son.
She has poured all her emotional energy, all her impulses and passion into this half of a person, and she clings to him like a miser to his treasure – there is no freedom, no joy, no true love here, only the fear of losing her “wealth.” Mothers like this come to psychologists exhausted by anxiety – “something is wrong with my child” (he drinks, smokes, runs away from home…), “do something with him.” And the moment you hint that the child is already well past… (20, 30, sometimes even 40), she flees in horror. The very thought that her precious child has grown up and can live an independent life causes the mother unbearable pain. She must do everything in her power to maintain the child’s dependence to eliminate even the slightest threat of separation. It’s a terribly sad and all-too-real picture…
But let’s return to our story. Next, as in many fairy tales, a step-by-step method is offered for escaping the pathological situation of a fractured soul under the weight of suffocating love. The healing strategy = psycho-therapy. The prince, upon learning that something has happened to his brother, sets out to find him. He locates the family with whom his brother had been living, delays the long explanations, and pretends to be his brother to learn what happened.
Let’s break it down: Step one – acknowledge that part of the soul is in trouble. Step two – make the decision to go in search of it. Step three – undertake the journey and find the lost half of the soul. Step four – learn about its way of life, accept it, and try it on for size.
Meanwhile, the mother, driven mad with anxiety, summons the sorcerer again – “Doctor, do something!” Undeterred by the reminder that everything must be paid for, she demands help in finding her son and killing his brother.
If only she had someone she trusted, someone to help her go through her own stages of soul healing, to support her in grief, fear, emptiness, to help her cope with the horror of non-existence…
But the sorcerer simply carries out her order.
The prince’s brother is indeed in trouble – in the forest, he has fallen into a cave and broken his leg, unable to save himself. Worse still, some terrible flying creature attacks him with clear intent to kill. The prince arrives just in time to help, shielding his brother with his own body. The creature does not attack the prince (here we begin to suspect what kind of creature it is). He kills the winged monster, and when it crumbles to dust, we see the body of a beautiful woman who was once the queen…
Everything must be paid for, and for the frenzied desire to reshape the natural order of things, for the violence against natural laws – one must pay an especially high price.
The prince returns his brother to his new family, while he himself returns to his kingdom.
It’s no longer possible to return to that absolutely happy, free, natural, and whole state, in unity with oneself and nature. But having learned to repel aggression, protect oneself, and attack, each part of the matured soul takes its rightful place and fulfills its function.
Second Story: A Woman Obsessed with Youth
A lustful king sleeps with everything that moves, and if it doesn’t move, he moves it and sleeps with it. He is a lost, lonely, empty man with no interests other than seducing another beauty – and then another, and another – he cannot stop. Handsome but hollow, unable to channel his passion anywhere else, he simply squanders his life force. We don’t know why he turned out this way – only a brief mention of some battles – but he appears before us as a man possessed and ridiculous.
This “lively bastard” hears the most tender maiden’s voice from the window of his castle and sets out to conquer the beautiful (or so he assumes!) stranger. He sends her jewels and flirts through a closed door. But we see that the stranger is actually an old woman, Dora, who somehow retained a girlish voice and an equally untarnished state of mind. She lives with her disgustingly infantile sister, Irma, and their childish stupidity and naivety are especially repellent in their exaggeratedly elderly appearances.
A vivid illustration of how immature a soul can be, regardless of chronological age.
Dora trembles at the possibility of seducing the king and, on the fly, devises a plan: keep him on a short leash for a couple of weeks, communicating through the door, while she quickly figures out how to rejuvenate herself so she can finally give herself to him.
It’s worth noting that the old fool is not lacking in determination and persistence, but all her plans are naive and unrealistic, in the spirit of “time to pump up those abs, and in half an hour, we’ll be at the beach,” or “lose weight by summer.” The fairy-tale writers even anticipated the achievements of plastic surgery – Irma stretches Dora’s skin and glues her sagging breasts back up… It’s both laughable and tragic, honestly. The king and his “beloved” are alike in that their desires and fantasies blind them to reality.
To the malicious delight of the audience (it’s hard to decide which character is more repulsive), Dora, with her glued-on breasts, even manages to deceive the king and sleep with him once. Then the deception is exposed, she is thrown out of the castle window, but, miraculously surviving, Dora eventually rejuvenates through some magical contrivances! Truly – be careful what you wish for, it might just come true. The king discovers a beautiful young woman (the actress is indeed stunningly beautiful), marries her, and they live in marital bliss.
They act out a model of barter relationships: he offers his high status, and she offers beauty and youth. Their communication is reduced to sex and joint public appearances – after the door-flirting phase, not a single dialogue takes place between them. And why would it?
Let’s return to the poor sister – she is lost, sad, and alone. She receives an invitation to a party at the castle, sees her sister there, begs to be allowed to stay, but in her stupidity, she reveals herself and is thrown out. Irma decides to rejuvenate herself (she doesn’t really need youth – she’s just afraid of loneliness and wants to be with her sister). In the process, she gets into a very bad situation (as we know from tabloids, underground plastic surgery never ends well). And that’s where her story ends.
If Dora is at least enterprising in pursuing her goal, Irma is fundamentally incapable of taking care of herself and ultimately destroys herself. These are two parts of an immature female soul – one is completely dependent, passive, unable to imagine herself without another, capable of doing anything to herself just to be with the object of her dependence (it’s hard to call it love, because there is no love – only the horror and emptiness of loneliness). The other is active, resourceful, and cunning, but has invested all her resources into an initially unrealistic goal, and ultimately burns out because of it. Like a good cautionary fairy tale, this story ends badly, terribly, and repulsively – to discourage others from following in their footsteps.
Third Story: Investing Love in the Wrong Object and Losing Romantic Illusions
This wonderful part contains elements of Kafka (a giant insect), Nietzsche (“man is a rope stretched over an abyss”), the abduction of Persephone, and the “Song of the Flea” from Faust.
There lives a rather charming king, and he has an equally charming daughter. Like many young ladies in their teenage years (and some even older), she is extremely vanilla, boring, and far too absorbed in cheap romance novels. Her mind is filled with kisses, sweet languor, and other romantic nonsense.
If this were a story set in modern times, she’d be sitting under a plaid blanket, sipping a cinnamon latte, and updating her VK statuses (“It’s impossible to kiss with your eyes open when you’re in love. Because when you kiss someone you love, tenderness gently steps onto your eyelids with its tiny feet…”).
Her face is fresh, naive, and framed by tender angelic curls, and her heart yearns for a prince so much that you could drink tea to this picture without sugar.
In general, you can understand the father – such a creature, woven from dreams and milk chocolate, is hard for a man to handle without female support. For some unknown reason, there is no mother, aunt, or wise grandmother in the family.
But instead of giving his daughter a slap and teaching her something useful (she is the heiress, after all), the king finds a flea and starts raising it. Naturally, he feeds it his own blood, and later, meat taken from his daughter’s plate. He makes toys for the flea instead of doing his kingly duties. In short, instead of his own flesh and blood, he spends all his energy raising a useless parasitic bloodsucker.
The king clearly belongs to the type of people who know how and love to raise and develop someone. He has an excess of care, but he has chosen a hollow object for this care. This is similar to those parents who, instead of approaching their child, looking them in the eye, and asking, “How are you? How are things?” brush them off with, “Don’t get underfoot, I need to build my business, I’m making money for you, you little brat.” Such a prioritization.
Absorbed in flea-rearing, the father takes a series of steps that result in his daughter being married off to a terrible cave-dwelling man-eater. Here we go, Dad. The man-eater, in principle, even takes care of her in his own way – he carries her to the cave on his back, gives her a piece of raw meat, and fulfills his marital duties. How is he supposed to understand that for a vanilla princess, this is a complete breakdown of all her templates? Her face loses its naivety, her angelic curls darken, and her heart no longer yearns for a prince but simply to save her life from this horror.
A story unfolds about sudden adulthood – through a brutal confrontation with reality. All youthful dreams and naivety instantly vanish, and the assessment of the situation becomes realistic – but at what cost is this adulthood achieved? “The street taught her,” in the absence of a wise guide into the adult world.
Miraculously, the princess finds rescuers. However, the man-eater catches up with them and kills them. And then comes the turning point – the princess runs, overcome with terror, in a weak attempt to hide. Realizing that she cannot escape the man-eater – he catches up with her, furiously throws her onto the rocks, and it’s truly terrifying. The audience freezes in suspense – she suddenly calms down. Slowly, she approaches him, looking into his eyes, and places her hands on his shoulders. She presses against him, demonstrating submission and affection. His rage subsides, and he helps her climb onto his back to carry her back to the cave. He tenderly strokes her hand with his huge thumb. The girl’s eyes become focused, and she pulls out a knife and kills her “husband.”
And it’s unclear who is more pitiable – him, a decent guy at heart, just with his own notions, or her – a girl who had to become a murderer to avoid losing herself completely. The naive girl is gone – a woman emerges, capable of being decisive, facing great danger, being aggressive, and cutting off what is unnecessary. The circus rescuers symbolize the first resource – humor, playfulness, flexibility, courage, and the ability to transform. The second resource – paradoxically – is the dead-end situation. When there’s nowhere left to run, you’re left with only two choices: die or survive. The third resource is the knife, i.e., aggression, the ability to attack. The fourth resource is inner qualities (determination, courage, resilience) that clearly manifest in the face of a challenge.
This same episode is a beautiful illustration of the well-known “persecutor-victim-rescuer” triangle, where roles inevitably and necessarily shift. The victim becomes the murderer, and the persecutor, in a moment of very human vulnerability and openness, becomes the victim. And the rescuers all die stupidly – the ungrateful role of any rescuer in family relationships. As the saying goes, “Two in a fight – the third…”
The princess, covered in blood, returns to the palace, where doctors are applying leeches to the sick king (she has an excess of someone else’s blood, he has an excess of his own, bad blood, which again has no one to give to). She returns victorious and bursts into tears.
The princess is crowned queen – after three incomplete, feeble (incapable) kings and an obsessed queen, a queen who could emerges in the fairy-tale space.
It’s impossible to say that she embodies pure good or pure evil – rather, she embodies both at the same time.
At the moment of the coronation, everyone sees a tightrope walker with a pole, balancing on a burning rope stretched between the castle towers. Balance – it’s so fragile.
