Perhaps you recently caught the gonzo trailer for Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales, in which Salma Hayek eschews the usual actressy meal of a light salad in order to make a lusty, bloody dinner of a sea monster’s heart. The movie premiered last night at the Cannes Film Festival, and it delivers on that promised heart-eating scene and then some; while it may have been difficult for most moviegoers to discern a theme – or even a point – to the very R-rated fairy tales folded together in Garrone’s English-language debut, he certainly didn’t skimp on the surreal images. Here, then, is just a random taste of things that really, seriously happened in Tale of Tales, and believe us when we say that even this super-bizarre list is just scratching the surface.
1. John C. Reilly dresses like Bioshock and fights a sea dragon
2. Salma Hayek eats a heart on a plate, face-first and without utensils
3. Vincent Cassel has no lines for the first half-hour of the film, but does kiss at least five topless women and kick a peacock
4. Salma Hayek immaculately conceives an albino, while at the same time, her maid also gives birth to an albino. Sixteen years later, both of their magic albinos love to swim and giggle together
5. Vincent Cassel sucks on a finger proffered through a gloryhole
6. Toby Jones wears a kimono and weeps over the body of his treasured pet, a six-foot-long flea who looks like when E.T. almost died
7. An old, wrinkly woman tries to glue the folds of her skin together to appear hotter
8. Vincent Cassel wakes up after sex, decides the woman in bed next to him is ugly, and has her thrown out the window
9. A hot dude examines a giant sheet of bug skin and says, “Giant manatee,†sending a nearby princess into paroxysms of lust
10. One old lady breast-feeds another, as you do
11. An old woman asks a man to flay her because it will get rid of her wrinkly skin and then maybe she’ll appear young (she is not properly thinking this through, let me tell you)
12. A tightrope-walker blows fire into an ogre’s face, which makes the ogre very mad
13. A bear hula-hoops for Salma Hayek