“Jackman shows great panache and proves to be a great storyteller.”

The classic collection of Middle Eastern folk tales known as One Thousand and One Nights has been the basis for a good number of adaptations throughout history. Inspired by Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel of roughly the same title, British director Julia Jackman turned it into her sophomore feature 100 Nights of Hero. The basic premise of Scheherazade’s original story remains the same: a woman telling a man a tale, night after night, to prevent him from doing something nefarious. An unabashedly quaint fantasy, 100 Nights of Hero combines a strong cast with an imaginative visual style that reminds one of Tarsem Singh’s 2006 The Fall (another film that loosely uses storytelling as a framing device) to create an enjoyable and breezy story of female liberation and male misogyny. Even if it’s quirky almost to a fault, 100 Nights of Hero should find a healthy circulation on the arthouse circuit.

Following a brief prologue that introduces a god named Birdman (a miniscule role by the always reliable Richard E. Grant) and his daughter Kiddo (Safia Oakley-Green), the story proper starts after the wedding of Kiddo’s daughter Cherry (Maika Monroe). She and her husband Jerome (Amir El-Masry) are pushed by their church elder to conceive as soon as possible, but on his wedding night Jerome comes up with excuses not to share Cherry’s bed, and he continues this every night. When he is visited by his friend Manfred (a wonderfully sleazy Nicholas Galitzine), he extols the fine qualities of his wife, qualities any wife should have: she is beautiful, chaste, good at mending socks, and a lover of falconry and chess. When Manfred lays eyes on Cherry his lust takes over, and he makes a wager with Jerome: while his friend is away on business for 100 days, Manfred will seduce Cherry, and should he succeed he will get both the woman and the castle.

Cherry has no intention of being seduced though, and her maid and best friend Hero (Emma Corrin) devises a plan: she will tell a continuous story that will lull Manfred into sleep every night. She spins a tale of three sisters, daughters of a sea captain with no male heir. The girls are therefore trained for marriage, but in secret they hone another skill, sinful and wicked, and forbidden for women: they read and write stories. One of the sisters, Rosa (pop star Charli XCX) is wooed by a merchant her father brings home, and for a time the two are happy together, until she inadvertently lets it slip that she can write. This blasphemy is punished by death, for Rosa and her sisters. Will Hero and Cherry face the same fate once they are found out?

Like any good fairy tale, 100 Nights of Hero has a bittersweet ending, one with a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo by Felicity Jones as ‘the moon’. Cherry and Hero find each other and leave the awful men in their lives behind (and their lives as well, it must be said), and women take the right to create stories into their own hands. With a slightly queer slant (Hero’s hands-on explanation to Cherry about the ways of courtship is intense enough to leave the latter flustered) the film rushes through its 90-minute runtime in extravagant costumes (courtesy of Susie Coulthard, doing fabulous work), colorful tableaux, and the deadpan humor and ‘slightly off’ characters that normally populate a Wes Anderson film, including a narrator directly interacting with the dialogue. The cast is game, from the wide-eyed innocence of Monroe to the sharpness of Corrin, and the ‘bedroom eyes’ of Galitzine in between. Jackman has a keen eye for composition and snappy editing, with help from Amélie Labrèche and Oona Flaherty (all creative roles behind the camera are filled by women), and while the prologue and epilogue that bookend Hero and Cherry’s story do not add much, Jackman shows great panache and proves to be a great storyteller herself. May she Scheherazade her way to a career of perhaps not one thousand and one films, but at least a good deal more of where this film came from.