The Tale of Tsar Saltan

One dark winter evening, the young tsar Saltan was lucky enough to find himself a tsarina from a simple Russian family. He was so impressed by the speech of the young charmer that he married her the same evening, and took her two sisters with him to the palace as servants. However, the treacherous girls do not share the happiness of their luckier sister and begin to plot. Saltan leaves for a long military campaign, during which the young queen gives birth to his son. The evil sisters write a dispatch to the tsar, where they brazenly lie about the child: they say, the queen gave birth to someone unknown, "neither a son nor a daughter." Saltan is upset, but orders to wait until his return. The sisters substitute the letter, and as a result, the girl and her son are sealed in a wooden barrel and thrown into the ocean in the best sadistic traditions.

Our read · The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1966) reads as a cosy, kinetic, inventive fantasy · family · folklore entry — gentle in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, measured in temperature, redemptive in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.