#pentamerone

So, it was about a year ago that I found @adarkrainbow's reviews on Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales and introduced him to the older adaptation of Basile's work, More than a miracle (aka Cinderella italian style, or Happily ever after). But thinking about it, there are more movies that, while not trying to adapt the whole of the parthenopeian fairytales, do cover singular stories from the Pentameron. I didn't know all of these movies beforehand, so there might be more I haven't found yet, which means this post might get some updates down the road.

1. Tale of Tales (il Racconto dei Racconti), Matteo Garrone, 2015

The movie that wears the original book's title, Tale of Tales is Garrone's first delve into outright fantasy. The themes of dreams and fairytales are something that this director (famous for more realistic films, like the much acclaimed Gomorra) often tried to tackle, since 2002's The embalmer, and which he revisited in 2019's Pinocchio. This adaptation takes three tales from the original collection (the enchanted doe, the flayed old lady, the flea) and retells them straight, without Basile's light-hearted but dark humour. The result is a film that embraces the "grim and gory fairytales" style. Yet Garrone never loses himself entirely to cynisism, there is always wonder and beauty alongside the grotesque.

2. More than a miracle (C'era una volta), Francesco Rosi, 1967

The original adaptation of Basile's work, More than a Miracle is a product of the italian style comedy and rode on the star power of Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif following Doctor Zhivago. In many ways an opposite work to Tale of Tales, this is the first attempt of adapting the Pentameron as a whole. But rather than adapting specific tales from the collection, Rosi takes elements and details from different stories and weaves his own original plot, following a haughty prince falling for a strong-willed peasant woman. The historical and geographical environment that created the book is also an actual setting in this movie, unlike the very fantastic and otherworldly Tale of Tales. Other folk tales and southern traditions also get mixed in, something that Roberto de Simone would also do with his play.

3. La Gatta Cenerentola, Roberto de Simone, Domenico Virgili, 1997

Ok, I'm really stretching the definition of "movie" here, since this is just a recording of de Simone's musical/operetta, first performed in 1976. But it is one of the most notable adaptations of Basile's fairy tales, one that unites the oldest italian version of Cinderella with modern day folk tales, collected by de Simone himself. The resulting piece not only explores the many different forms Cinderella can take, but also depicts neapolitan folk culture, with its traditions, language and music. Naples is just as much of a protagonist as Cinderella is, really one represents the other.

4. Cinderella the Cat (Gatta Cenerentola), Alessandro Rak, 2017

Again I'm bending the rules here, since this movie is arguably more inspired by the play than by the fairy tale, but I think it can still be included. For one thing, Mia and her father are called Basile in this adaptation, so there's a definite awareness of the source material. Also, the King is a proper defined character in this version, unlike de Simone's play where he doesn't even appear. Though its being a jukebox musical, the six stepsisters having a feminiella among them and a plot that has the city of Naples at its heart, lead back to the NCCP's great retelling. The inclusion also of a prince character in Primo Gemito gives away the influence of other retellings too. All in all this movie is its own thing, with well made 3d animations, an interesting relationship between Cinderella, the stepmother and the King, and a clever use of the shoe.

5. The myrtle maiden (O myrtové panně), Svatava Simonová, 1992

I only discovered this movie this year, thanks to @fairytaleslive. Again, this isn't a direct adaptation of Basile's fairy tale, La mortella (the Myrtle), but of Clemens Brentano's retelling, Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein, from his italian fairytales. Unlike previous examples, which were all mostly produced in Italy, this movie come from Czechia, a land with a much richer tradition in fairy tale movies. Nevertheless, this isn't the most outstandig production.

Everywhere on the Internet you have these posts and videos and whatnot about "The dark truth behind Sleeping Beauty" or "The Horrifying Origins of Sleeping Beauty!", and they all refer to the fact that in the "original" version of the tale, she got raped in her sleep. This is the "dark fact" everybody LOVES to spread around and talk about. Except... Except the version they refer to is Basile's "Sun, Moon and Thalia".

Why does that matter? I'll explain.

Everybody depicts "Sun, Moon and Thalia" as this sort of dark, horrifying tale of a grim and gruesome crime. They will have in their video a dark background, and creepy illustrations, and they will take an ominous horror movie voice and whatnot.

But there's a big problem with that. Basile's stories were all except serious. They were humoristic tales. Or more precisely, they were farcical stories. Farces. There's a reason its "twin compilation", Straparola's fairytale collection, is called "Facetious Nights". So the very idea of presenting these stories as if they were meant to be taken seriously is completely misreading the story's tone. Yes there was a rape - but if you extract this from the entire context and storytelling, you make this tale sound like something it is absolutely not.

"Sun, Moon and Thalia" is not meant to be a horror story. It was not meant to be read as "serious" story. It has nothing to do with either the Grimm or Perrault fairytales. The entirety of the "Pentamerone" is basically a folk-sex comedy. If such a thing can exist.

Every fairytale of the Pentamerone is opened by a small recap of the story announcing what it will be about - and already from the get-go the very two lines opening this recap give the humoristic nature of the tale away. "Thalia dies because of a splinter". I mean come on - the joke is obvious. A girl gets a splinter, she dies. And if this wasn't enough the rest of the sentence can be translated as following: "she is left in a room where the son of the king penetrates and makes her two children". The choice of the word "penetrate" is to highlight the pun in the original line where the prince entering Thalia's bedroom and the prince entering Thalia's body is resumed in one same verb.

For more breakdown of the jokes of the story, see below the cut:

A birthday gift I did for @ilpentamerone of a couple of some very in-love OC's together. I'm really pleased how this turned out, particularly the shading/colours.

༻✦༺ Petrosinello ༻✦༺

A gay reimagining of "Petrosinella" (a Rapunzel's variant) featuring Emanuele Mariotti as Petrosinello (Rapunzel's counterpart), Alberto Malanchino as the Prince and Pierfrancesco Favino as the Ogre (Mother Gothel, basically).

✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧ :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ

"Petrosinella" (Little Parsley) was written in Neapolitan by Giambattista Basile and he included it in his 1634 collection of fairy tales "The Tale of Tales." It is an Aarne–Thompson type 310 "the Maiden in the Tower" tale, as well as the earliest recorded variant of "Rapunzel." The Brothers Grimm's more famous version was published almost two centuries later, in 1812.

You can read an English translation of "Petrosinella" here.

✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧ :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ

The Pentamerone 

Download this book or just read about it, here:

So, if you interest yourself in fairy tales and their origins, you might have come across the assertion that the first instance of Hänsel and Gretel, as for so many folk tales, comes from the Pentameron. In it, we have the tale of Nennillo e Nennella, either the 7th or 8th story of the V day (depending on the edition), in which the titular children are left in the woods by their father Jannuccio, after the wishes of their stepmother Pasciozza, due to their poverty. On their first trip, the father leaves a trail of ash, which the children follow home, but on the second he just leaves breadcrumbs, a donkey eats these, and the kids are lost to the forest. But there is an even older example offered, Das Erdkühlein, "the little earth cow", from Martin Montanus' Gartengesellschaft (the garden company), from 1560. Here we have two sisters, Maidlein (a nickname of Margarete, like Gretel) and Annelein, a wicked stepmother and a plan to abandon a stepchild in the forest, first foiled by trails of sawdust and chaff, but that takes place after the girl uses linen seeds, which are picked by birds.

So far so good, right? These tales present close similarities to both Hänsel and Gretel and its predecessor, Perrault's Little Tumbling, so it makes sense to consider these two stories as the influences for the more famous ones. Except the way the older tales continue does not match Grimm or Perrault at all! Neither Nennillo, Nennella or Maidlein meet a child-eating monster, that they have to outwit to survive, nor is their return home a grand happy ending. The chidlren in Basile are separated, Nennillo raised by a prince, and Nennella taken by pirates and swallowed by a magic fish, only to be saved by her brother, and the prince punishing their stepmother; Maidlein meets the titular earth cow, a magic animal that keeps her well-fed, until her stepmother and jealous sister kill it and take her home to continue their abuse. While Grimms' and Perrault's stories are categorized as two subtypes of ATU 327 ("The children and the Witch", and "the dwarf and the giant"), the two older examples follow different structures. The little earth cow is an instance of ATU 511 ("One-eye, two-ey, three-eye), a type of story more closely related to Cinderella (the one giving Maidlein her trails back home is in fact her godmother). So it might be more correct to see the older tales as the first cases of this fairy tale BEGINNING, not of the tale types themselves. But then what is the model Nennillo and Nennella is following?

It has been a long time since I did a fairytale movie analysis, and for this month I want to take a look at a movie that has been asked of me before, a long time ago: "Tale of Tales".

For those of you who do not know about this movie, "Tale of Tales" is a 2015 movie, a "European production" (it is an Italian movie, but it received help and collaboration from France and England, hence the "European" etiquette) that is to this day (and to my knowledge) the only movie that adapts Basile's Pentamerone, the titular "Tale of Tales".

The Pentamerone being one of the two foundational works when it comes to literary fairytales, and one of the two great books of classical Italian literary fairytales alongside Straparole's Facetious Nights. Basile's book is very famous for containing some of the earlier literary records of fairytale types such as Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, The Girl Without Hands, and more.

The book contains a total of fifty stories, and of course the movie couldn't adapt them all, so it was decided to only adapt three in total. The three chosen are usually considered emblematic stories of the Pentamerone - but they were also selected because they do not echo the more well known Grimm stories. The three selected were, The Flea, The Enchanted Doe, and The Flayed Old Lady - all taken from the first part of the book.

Note that this movie was greatly acclaimed for its extensive use of practical special effects - and there is one thing you cannot deny this movie, it looks absolutely incredible. There is a great effort on the visuals ranging from selected architecture and landscape to careful costume crafting and delightful monsters on screen.

Before going into the analysis of each of the fairytales of the movie, I wanted to point out a few things covering the entirety of the movie. Three details to be exact.

Matteo Garrone, when doing this movie, didn't just randomly selected three stories that were to his fancy. He chose three specific stories that he then tied together with cohesive themes and motifs. The first of which, the most prominent, being "obsession". Each segment is about presenting the obsessions of specific characters, and the bad outcomes of it.

The other shared motif between the three fairytales is "the ages of a woman". Despite the movie having as much male as female characters, Garrone explained very clearly that this movie was about the women, not the men, and that each fairytale represented one of the traditional three "ages of woman". "The Flea" becomes the Maiden story, focusing on the young princess ; "The Enchanted Doe" becomes the Mother story, with an exploration of the character of the queen, while "The Flayed Old Lady" is of course the Crone tale.

But much more importantly for us to understand this movie: Matteo Garrone did one very heavy and important change compared to the original material. The tone. The tone is radically different. Basile's original book, just like Straparole's fairytales, worked by the specific nature of these Italian literary fairytales of the time: they were grotesque farces, and vulgar jokes. In my last post about the Pentamerone I compared these stories to a Brandon Rogers video, because Basile's stories, despite being the ancestors of the Grimm or Perrault fairytales, are nothing like the modern fairytales we are today. They are sex stories filled with caricatures, they are gruesome, gory stories filled with morally-gray characters, they are one huge dark joke filled with poop and farts and vulgar allusions. They are much closer to medieval tales and to the tone of a Reynard the Fox story or some Rabelais books than any other fairytales we know today. But Garrone decided to apply a principle that you can see explored in series such as "Horace and Pete" or "Kevin can fuck himself". Take a sitcom, remove the laugh-track, you have a tragedy. Garrone's movie is still as grotesque as the original stories - but now the jokes are put aside, the most vulgar parts removed, the sex and the gore examined for what it is under a realistic eye. This "realistic", and "non-comical" treatment of the stories make this world of grotesque caricatures and senseless violence and depraved debauchery one not of marvels and fairies, but one of tragedies, of abuse, of horror. But, tragedies with magic, abuse with beauty, horror with happy and hopeful endings - because they stay fairytales after all, no matter how dark they are. Mean, cruel, sad fairytales, but fairytales nonetheless.

[Trivia: The fact that Basile's work was a very rude, crude and vulgar piece of sex-and-violence that can only be compared to Rabelais meeting Punch & Judy, is something many people in the English-speaking world completely missed because the first real popular and widespread translations of the text in English, in the... I think it was the 19th century or maybe a bit earlier ; but these versions were heavily censored. Trying to make the story more like a Perrault or d'Aulnoy tale, they removed many sex references, remove all the poop jokes, and even cut off some stories deemed too vulgar ot gruesome, so that for a very long time people thought they were supposed to be... regular fairytales. This is especially relevant with "Thalia, the Sun and the Moon", Basile's "Sleeping Beauty" variant. Many people point out that the girl in this story gets raped by the prince and that this shows how the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty was built on a glorification of rape, because it is treated as ormal or as some romance. But... no. This rape is treated as a rape and the prince is very clearly a lustful asshole who is taking advantage of the girl - because it is a dark sex-tale. Princes in the Pentamerone are almost all lustful rapists, violent murderers or complete helpless idiots, because the Pentamerone does not work on a "prince charming" logic. Take "The Golden Root" - the handsome, kind, gentle, good prince that seems to fit the bill of the Prince Charming... is part of a family of ogres, and ends up murdering in rage his intended fiancée just to be married to the heroine of the tale. And that's something that many people missed for a very long time - the prince charming archetype is from the French tales of the 17th and 18th century, not before.]