Back to Back 30 - The Uses of Enchantment

Contrasting offbeat 17th-century fairytales from post-mod cinema masters

May 03, 2024

Donkey Skin (1970) - Writer, director: Jacques Demy. Based on Peau d'Ane by Charles Perrault (1695)
Tale of Tales (2015) - Cowriter, director: Matteo Garrone; cowriters: Edoardo Albinati, Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso. Based on Il Pentamarone by Giambattista Basile (1636)

So-called “children’s literature” attempts to entertain or to inform, or both. But most of these books are so shallow in substance that little of significance can be gained from them. The acquisition of skills, including the ability to read, becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one’s life...
Nothing can be as enriching and satisfying to child and adult alike as the folk fairy tale... more can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society, than from any other type of story within a child’s comprehension.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976)

Bettelheim's book sets out a striking thesis: that there is probably no better tool for the development of children's emotional maturity and strength than the folk wisdom and encounter with danger depicted in the classic folk tale. He stated that "As an educator and therapist of severely disturbed children, my main task was to restore meaning to their lives." Sadly, this claim was in itself a fairytale; he had no training in psychotherapy and in fact held a PhD in art history. But never mind, the thesis still stands.

OK, it’s true, he plagiarized large chunks of this work, but what's a little copying between chums? The thesis still stands, I'm telling you: fairy tales help kids become people, whereas most of what they get to consume as baby media-consumers doesn't do shit for their growth as little humans, and most likely harms it. Anyone who's seen what happens if you let YouTube stream kids' content on autoplay knows what nightmares of traumatic experience await them.

I read Bettelheim as part of a degree course on literature in the 80s, just as fairytales were making a comeback into modern adult fiction. Just three years after Bettelheim’s study, Angela Carter's tremendous short story collection The Bloody Chamber was published. It was a triumphant return for fairytale-folk in the Gothic horror tradition and a great stimulant for the writing that became 'weird fiction' soon after that, allowing fantasy-horror content of an adult nature to be accepted in the mainstream once again.

Then Neil Jordan adapted one of Carter's stories for The Company of Wolves (1984) and the modern Gothic art-house movie was hived off from the horror genre to become its own fantasy thing. It's notable that the Carter story most closely associated with traditional horror content, a werewolf tale based on 'Red Riding Hood', would become the one selected for a film adaptation.

Adult versions of Puss-in-Boots and Beauty and the Beast ('adult' of course meaning grown-up in theme, not porno) would have to wait a while; though of course Disney scored a massive hit with its animated musical version of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946), making it a favourite for all the family in 1991.

There were also family-friendly hits in this period with The Dark Crystal (1982), Labyrinth (1986), and The Princess Bride (1987). Moreover, Disney kept up the fairytale output during their famous 90s Renaissance, until they packed it in on this successful model after 1999 for no known reason. But here the focus will be on 'mature content' - again not porno, but themes that would be disturbing to kids, or at least prompt them to ask some fairly awkward questions ('Daddy, do you want to marry me, like the King in the story?' 'Erm... how about some more popcorn, Gillian?').

Latin American nations and others in the Global South do magical realism; Anglo-Americans do Gothic horror. The French and Italians like adult fairy tales too, as we shall see, but tend to make them camp and airy in tone, though often packing a horrific punch under the dainty sparkly-lamé glove.

But what about when the content and theme moves away from horror, from vampires and werewolves, and becomes more of a fairytale? I've prepared a more complete list, but for now we can get on with one of the most delightful and entertaining fairytale movies ever made, Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin, starring a Catherine Deneuve at her most charming.

This witty, colourful fairytale extravaganza comes complete with blue oompaloompas, toad-spitting crones, living light fixtures, helicopter fairies, and treasure-shitting donkeys. It features a deeply disturbed royal family with dysfunctional relations and perverse sexual desires. So basically it's a documentary.

It's a colour film, and I mean COLOUR. The colours are so vibrant and saturated that prolonged exposure to the vivid hues could easily send you into chromatic shock syndrome, if that wasn't in fact just a thing I made up. The film is the result of taking the fairytale aesthetic and the do-it-yourself camera trickery of Jean Cocteau’s black-and-white fantasy masterpieces, and injecting a colour palette such that you could imagine that the colour is going to leak out of the screen.

Add kitsch and a knowing wink at the sophistication of the audience by making the characters absurdly naive, and the result is one of the most intentionally camp movies ever.

The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers. Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Sternberg’s six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman.
Susan Sontag "Notes on Camp" (1964), in Against Interpretation.

However, Sontag goes on to state that the best camp is found when it's not intentionally made that way, but when it follows sincerely from a certain way of being and feeling. In which case she would probably not like Donkey Skin very much, because the aesthetic does not seem natural to the sincerity of the film's intention, as it does in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, but rather arch and calculated, overlaid as an ironic and consciously camp gag.

The film stars Jean Marais as the pervy king who wants to marry his own daughter, interpreting this sick notion as the wish of his late wife. Catherine Deneuve is the beautiful princess in question, but get this - she actually wants to marry daddy. She only goes through the motions of being reluctant at the prompting of her fairy godmother, a red-hot 1940s vamp à la Jean Harlow, who has her own mysterious motives for obstructing the incestuous match.

So the fairy godmother suggests that the princess demand the skin of the king's treasured money-donkey, who eats hay and shits gold and jewels, as a condition to agreeing this forbidden union. The king provides the skin and head of his defunct money-pooping beast, which the princess then uses as a disguise to escape the castle and run off to become a scullery-maid in another town. Hijinks ensue, red prince charming, you know the drill.

There is an obvious Freudian-complex angle to all of this. But if we're going to follow Bettelheim's Jungian-therapeutic interpretation of folk tales, we might say that a tale that doesn't feature some taboo, whether theft or incest or cannibalism, wouldn't have much value in confronting that icky mess of conflicted fear and desire which is our subconscious (or Jungian shadow) and integrating it into a mature self.

I'm no psychologist, but I find that after seeing this film I have a great deal less desire to marry my daughter, and instead feel the need to get hitched to a mature fairy-woman of my own generation . Helps that the fairy bride in question being helicoptered in is Delphine Seyrig and that she’s looking pretty damn magnificent.

The clearly dark tale of Hansel and Gretel has had many horror retellings in film form. But what about a story like this one which is apparently all colour and light and silly little songs, but at its heart contains the darkest material of all? Insist on the light, says Demy, and let the taboo work itself out in the spaces behind the laughter and the witty visual references.

Formally, the film has a great deal in common with Cocteau's fairytale classic, not least the male lead Marais. However it amplifies the camp and the humour of that film to pastiche levels, while also injecting a hefty dose of pop-art vibrancy into the monochrome noirish world of Cocteau. If Beauty and the Beast was modernist, retelling a folk tale in ironic form, Donkey Skin is postmodernist, taking that irony and reboubling it on itself.

Whether it succeeds in its artistic aims, or whether it falls victim to its own archness, Donkey Skin is certainly entertaining. The kitsch levels run high, and then higher still, so that within five minutes you are in a world of sparkly wonder like Dorothy's Oz or Wonka's Wonderland, but one that is dangerously unstable and set to collapse on itself at any moment.

But the camp ramps up in every single scene: why is the King sitting on a throne that is a gigantic plushy pussycat? What's up with the wall decorations that are bare-breasted blue living women? Does blue oompaloompa colour run in the rain?

There are also shots of breathtaking beauty, like the four men on horseback, clad in scarlet with red-dyed horses, galloping through a green forest toward a magnificent French palace (Le Chateau de Chambord) in the evening light. Unforgettable fairytale maginficence.

And there are funny puzzles, like the crone who coughs up frogs - is it a reference to the common saying of "having a frog in your throat"? Apparently that's not the phrase in French, where it's a cat, but Demy knew English and maybe thought it was funny. Like the way the princess decides to bake a "cake d'amour" - a love cake - in hilarious Franglais.

There are so many delightful jokes that work simply by virtue of them playing it all dead straight. Like the way everyone calls Catherine Deneuve's disguised princess hideous and grotesquely ugly just because she has a bit of dirt smeared on her face. It's almost a satire of the classic Hollywood "why, without your glasses, you're beautiful" schtick, with its totemic signalling of what's beautiful at the most absolutely superficial level. Here, Demy says, the donkey-skin-deep is all you're going to get, enjoy the silly songs, and so it might seem, if not for that strange feeling...

—-INTERMISSION—

Matteo Garrone embodies that saying by surrealist Max Ernst, that an artist should keep one eye closed to look inside oneself at dreams and fantasies, and one eye open to gaze at the stark reality of the world. Garrone prefers to do that sequentially, making a fantasy film, then a brutal (though always great-looking) realist film of low-life crime and desperation, then back to fantasy again, and so on. You would never think that the guy who made Dogman (2018), one of the bleakest crime dramas ever, also made Pinocchio (2019), or that sleaze-filled gangster epic Gomorrah (2008) came from the same maker as Tale of Tales.

Garrone stated that they made film treatments for quite a few tales of the original 49 in Basile's 1636 Pentamerone collection, but chose to make three which share a common thread of a desire that becomes an obsession. He also points out that the stories take place in three different stages of a woman's life - maiden, mother and crone - which makes them conform to a very ancient triad of mythical archetypes, if not the very oldest.

So we can start with the obvious and indisputable fact that this is one of the most visually lush and gorgeous films ever. Every 5 minutes, regular as clockwork, a scene comes at you that is the most marvellous and spectacular thing ever seen in film.

You suspect CGI but in fact every shot is hand-crafted in the old fashioned way. Nobody disputes the visual beauty of this film, and nobody seriously could. All that would be needed to counter such a faulty argument would be a series of stills from the movie presented as a gallery of wonder for the eyes to feast on.

Moreover the feel of the 17th-century baroque setting is painstakingly created in costume, music, art and furnishings, so that the staging of the film as piece of period historical drama (one eye open on the real world) is impeccable.

Perfect visual composition and realization of the setting, then. So at this point it's customary to say 'but it's all style and no substance' and say why it comes short of one’s lofty expectations. But actually no, Garrone and his co-writers have actually crafted a powerful series of folk tales that do what folk tales are supposed to do: make you a better person.

Of course the traditional fairytale was too messy and jagged in its thematic presentation to be didactic in the obvious way, unlike, say, the Aesopean fable which had a do or don't built in to the stated moral of the tale. but nobody has ever made a film of Aesop's fables, and if they did it would be the most boring fairytale ever.

However, as Bettelheim the fake psychiatrist and plagiaristic bestseller writer contends, you actually learned something from these old-world folktales, even if not explicitly in the form of a moral:

There is a right time for certain growth experiences, and childhood is the time to learn bridging the immense gap between inner experiences and the real world. Fairy tales may seem senseless, fantastic, scary, and totally unbelievable to the adult who was deprived of fairy-story fantasy in his own childhood, or has repressed these memories. An adult who has not achieved a satisfactory integration of the two worlds of reality and imagination is put off by such tales.
But an adult who in his own life is able to integrate rational order with the illogic of his unconscious will be responsive to the manner in which fairy tales help the child with this integration. To the child, and to the adult who, like Socrates, knows that there is still a child in the wisest of us, fairy tales reveal truths about mankind and oneself.
Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment

This is not to say that Garrone's Tale of Tales should be shown to young children; far from it. At certain brief moments of the film it contains some of the most horrific content I’ve ever seen. The sight of a woman who has voluntarily had herself flayed walking painfully home to die in her bloodied ballgown is not something people can easily forget. Salma Hayek as the desperate queen gnawing hungrily on a monster's heart - a stark black, white and red composition - is much more disturbing than it has any right to be.

And Garrone's fairytale monster is, to my mind at least, far scarier than nearly all other horror story monsters, outside of Clive Barker's Hellraiser series.

No, the learning on offer is aimed at grown-ups, but at the child inside the grown-ups who is still receptive to such 'truths about mankind and oneself'. Are we sacrificing too much to gain what we desire? Is what we desire really good for us anyway? Is our protective care for our loved ones healthy for them and ourselves? Is one's prestige and pride worth losing everything valuable that we already have?

To my mind the final scenes, where the chickens very much come home to roost in the proverbial henhouse of unforeseen consequences, are powerful not only with some kind of unstated moral but with the fresh and unexpected nature of the story dénouement. In a fairytale you more or less expect whatever happens to happen, but it's the genius of Garrone and his screenwriters, and perhaps also of Giambattista Basile the original author of the tales, that what happens here is fresh and unexpected.