June’s Side Street Films offerings are two sumptuous costume dramas: one a work of gothic imagination inspired by the fairy-tales of 17th-century Italian academic, courtier and soldier Giambattista Basile and the other an adaptation of a little-known novella by Jane Austen.

Italian director Matteo Garrone, probably best known for the award-winning Gomorra in 2008, takes on Tale of Tales, Basile’s seminal work which consists of 50 tales, popular oral traditions in Crete and especially Venice.

Tale of Tales is an epic piece, with three main separate story strands. The first stars Salma Hayek as the Queen of Longtrellis, who forfeits the life of her husband (John C. Reilly) in order to conceive a child. In the second, two mysterious sisters (Shirley Henderson and Hayley Carmichael) provoke the passion of the King of Strongcliff (Vincent Cassel), while the third features the King of Highhills (Toby Jones) whose obsession with a giant Flea leads to heartbreak for his young daughter.

As can be gleaned from the above description, it is a film whose storylines melds the beautiful with the bizarre. “I chose to tackle the universe of Basile because in his tales, I found that blend between the real and fantastic which has always characterised my artistic endeavours,” says Garrone. “The stories recounted in The Tale of Tales cover all of life’s opposites: the ordinary and the extraordinary, the magical and the everyday, the regal and the obscene, the straightforward and the artificial, the sublime and the filthy, the terrible and the tender, scraps of mythology and torrents of popular wisdom. The tales recount human feelings pushed to the extreme.”

Although he inspired many authors after him, including the Brothers Grimm, Basile remained virtually unknown for hundreds of years

Selecting which tales to adapt from the 50 in Basile’s work obviously posed a challenge for the director and his team, who wanted to choose the stories they liked the most and then make them credible and concrete “as if we were seeing them take place before our eyes.”

“Our approach was to search for something powerful, physical, shared and authentic, even in the stories in which the imagination was the most fired-up. In Basile’s work, there’s a great pleasure in the narrative, and that should also be a prerogative of cinema,” adds Garrone. Although he inspired many authors after him, including the Brothers Grimm, Basile remained virtually unknown for hundreds of years, and Garrone says that it “would a great thing if the film made people curious and encouraged them to read the book.”

Love and Friendship

Jane Austen certainly needs no introduction, yet the novella on which Love and Friendship is based very probably does. Lady Susan is believed to have been written in the mid-1790s when Austen was around 20, and was published by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh in 1871, more than 50 years after her death.

Kate Beckinsale plays the beautiful, young widow Lady Susan Vernon, who visits the estate of her in-laws to wait out the colourful rumours about her dalliances that circulate through polite society.

While there, she decides to secure a husband for herself and a future for her eligible, but reluctant, daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark). As she goes about her machinations, confiding in her best friend Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny), Lady Susan attracts the simultaneous attentions of the young, handsome Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), the rich and silly Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) and the divinely handsome, but married, Lord Manwaring (Lochlann O’Mearáin), complicating matters severely.

As Lady Susan, Beckinsale gives a career-best performance, creating a fully-rounded character who is for the most part unlikeable, yet simultaneously admirable... a forward-thinking woman who has to make the most of the constraints imposed on her gender at the time.

Love and Friendship is certainly a delightful discovery, not only as a movie, but for unearthing a hitherto-unseen side to Austen, what with its conniving protagonist, the biting satire aimed at the social mores of the time (not least its romantic notions) and the humour and wit you would ascribe more to the likes of Oscar Wilde.

American director Whit Stillman has created a superb adaptation, which boasts all the tropes of a superb costume drama, with its elegant outfits and detailed production design. But he also presents something fresh and exciting and, judging by the acclaim the film has received to date, I would posit that it’ll be one of the protagonists come awards season later this year.

Tale of Tales and Love and Friendship are now showing at Eden Cinemas under the Side Street Films banner.