Drawing on the original children’s story for his new live-action version, the Gomorrah director combines sentimentality and the grotesque in a unique way
There is something rich and strange and generous in Matteo Garrone’s new live-action version of the Pinocchio story, for which the director and his co-screenwriter Massimo Ceccherini have gone right back to the original 1883 children’s tale by Carlo Collodi. They have given us a story that combines sentimentality and grotesqueness in a really startling way. It looks like a horror film. This Pinocchio could almost have one of the stories that Garrone dramatised in his freaky-fabular movie Tale of Tales, and the story is very different from the legendary 1940
Disney musical version – without which, admittedly, no one would care about any new remake or reinvention.
Walt Disney, for example, never had Pinocchio being brutally hanged from a tree by two swindlers who wanted to rob him. But one of the interesting things about this drama is that Pinocchio – the magical wooden puppet who yearns to be a “real boy” – gains this authentic humanness by being exploited, by suffering and finally getting reborn with skin and hair. In a stable, as it happens.