Las Hadas Modernas

Paris, late 17th century. While Versailles bleeds from poisonings, paranoia, and perfumes used to mask the stench of chamber pots, in a Parisian salon a group of noblewomen —led by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, recently rehabilitated after a scandal, imprisonment, and a child marriage to a brutal baron— gather to recount what the hostess herself has just christened "fairy tales." A century before the Brothers Grimm, it is they, along with a widowed Charles Perrault, recently expelled from court, who are founding the modern fairy tale: Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, witches, and poisoned princesses who are nothing more than coded versions of their own lives, marked by violent husbands, confinement, sold daughters, and vanished lovers. Among them, however, a wolf has slipped in: someone who listens, takes notes and betrays, and who threatens to take them to the gallows one by one.