Once upon a time there were three kingdoms: a queen and two kings.
The first wants a son at all costs; the second has a daughter and does not want to give her in marriage; the third is a lustful figure suffering from satyriasis.
Compulsive desire afflicts them along with the most extreme perversions.
The voracious queen mother will turn into a murderous mantis in order to bear a son who will have a bastard twin born of a virgin, a 17th-century Christ. Her condemnation will be to not want to accept that her son Elias is other than her, and motherhood will constitute in sterility and fertility her alienating obsession.
The king, with his daughter Viola, will become a victim of his perversion for arthropods bred to human size; only an ogre will recognize the smell of her skin and win his daughter as his bride.
The satyric king, he will lure a woman into his bed, blinded by the darkness of his addiction, rewarded by the nature of the elixir of youth and cheated by the end of the spell.
Power, sex, motherhood, desire, cruelty, taste, smell, dermis, spell, visions, abrasions, monsters, dwarves, albinos, leeches, fleas, dragons, ogres, labyrinths,tightrope walkers....
Death is the sine qua non of life and not even the worst.
Skin the most telling zest.
A castrating queen mother, a possessive and morbid father king who holds his daughter hostage, a seducer king blinded by compulsiveness.
The family, the Oedipus complex and Electra's complex; the pseudo-love that is the end that justifies any means.
The monsters are the real victims and the too inhuman humans the executioners of themselves.
The darkness of reason gives birth to the monsters of ignorance and addiction, manipulating any possibility of awareness.
The fable of the impossible "emergence from the state of minority" of the Enlightenment of Kantian memory; we are in the utter obscurantism of an eternally dark humanity.
Power wears down even those who have it, and the three stories of Lo cunto de li cunti, are a cruel, omnipotent and insatiable fresco.
The blood flows, the skin oxidizes and colors Garrone's sublime art of making exuberant and filthy ambiguity visible.
Nothing is correct and the content surpasses the form; for the surface is either deep or it is not.
Is it the tightrope walker from Nietzsche's Zarathustra that closes Garrone's artwork?
Man is a cable stretched between the beast and the superman, - a cable above an abyss. A perilous passage, a perilous being on the way, a perilous looking back and a perilous shuddering and stopping. Man's greatness is to be a bridge and not a purpose.......................
The narrative resorts to the tightrope walker as a metaphorical figure representing the eternal, present-day condition of man, precariously poised on the thin, taut thread of existence.
A regurgitation of Freudian complexes, gender identity and myths of youth.
Nothing turns out unexplored and the content exorbitant if one is not trivially enchanted by a container of hypnotic and unforgettable images.
