The Italian director Matteo Galloni in the impression seems to still be filming "Gamola", but in his new work "The Story of Stories", it is truly amazing. Unlike his previous movies, in this movie, Galloni seems to use his own unique film language to construct a magical fairy tale world, with a despicable curse, terrible predictions and the corruption of death. The film is adapted from the ancient legends of the seventeenth century. Galloni puts a delicate dress on these ancient legends, and gives this movie adapted from the ancient legends its own meaning and context. Compared with Galloni's previous movies, this movie can be said to be stunning and beautiful.
Although the film is based on fairy tales, the audience for the whole film is adults. Except for the weird characters, the whole film gives people a sense of uneasy fear. Conspiracy, lust, control, death... these words that shouldn't appear in fairy tales are the themes of this movie, and also the most interesting part of it. The film revolves around three members of the royal family, one is the queen who can’t ask for children, the other is the king who is addicted to eroticism, and the other is the monarch who is obsessed with insects...curses and fate, desires and traps, weird And rebellion, water monster, prophet, fairy, devil, monster, wandering entertainer, old woman...These elements and characters have appeared one after another, constructing three weird and sad stories.
In the movie, Galloni used his imagination and endless scenes to interpret every story almost perfectly, including many depictions of historical features and social customs. In this movie, the director presents each element in a crazy, wonderful, and beautiful visual form, making people indulge in a new world.
The first story is beautiful and cruel. The beautiful queen is distressed because she has no children of her own. A prophet told her that as long as she can kill the water monsters in the lake and choose a virgin to cook, she can eat it. Get pregnant immediately. In order to realize her dream of giving birth, the queen sacrificed the king and finally got two twins with albinism. In the second story, the pitiful and helpless monarch is obsessed with an old woman who has only seen her back. He mistakenly thought that the old woman was a young girl, so Dora had a fight with him in the dark. Joy. It wasn't until the sun shone on Dora the next morning that he realized that it was a nightmare. The third story is absurd and sad. The weird king likes to raise strange creatures. One day, he caught a flea and raised it. After the flea died, it used the flea skin as a test for choosing a husband for his daughter, which eventually brought terrible consequences.
The film is carried out in a bright and colorful fairy tale style, and shocking bloody scenes appear from time to time. The strong contrast between each other forms a weird visual tension, which brings strong shock to people. For example, Dora's sister asked the skinner to peel off her skin. When she appeared bloody around the castle, it gave people a creepy feeling. When the camera is turned from behind, the audience sees a bloody face. When this cruel and quiet castle collided, the film had risen to a cruel stage.
Compared with other fantasy movies, "Story of Stories" is filled with some gloom of death. The director puts the audience in a dreamlike world and feels the illusion and reality in the absurd story. Desire, greed, vanity, fraud, violence, death, etc. in the film are all projections of real life. Galloni used his own lens to strip these fantasy stories from reality, and then transform them into a kind of prophecy and mapping between light and shadow.
At the end, the acrobat walks freely on the ropes. This setting and the beginning of the film said that "everything is balanced. If you want to get it, you always need to give and lose first." It forms a kind of echo, gain and loss, reality. And dreams are the true meaning hidden in this fairy tale.
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