The Decameron (1971)

The erotic and more or less picaresque stories of which this movie is composed is based upon a collection of tales written in the 14th century by Bocaccio an Italian writer already called the Voltaire of 14th century. In the Middle Ages there was a tendency later abandoned, of considering erotic adventures under a humoristic point of view. The most common "hero" of those tales was the cuckold husband. I'm not a great fan of Pasolini. However this movie is more or less successful in depicting a series of funny situations related with erotic entanglements. Its merit is more due to the narrative form than to the stories itselves some them less funny than others. But the composition of the successive scenes develops in a series of pictures full of colour and movement portraying the people in the streets in a realistic way, showing popular types such as peasants, merchants, priests, nuns, etc. most of them with no make-up at all which contributes to create a vivid atmosphere that really puts us in the middle of a mediaeval scenery. Not a masterwork but something worth to be seen anyway.

Fmovies: During the years immediately preceding the spellbinding horrors of his swansong "Salo", Pasolini created a trilogy of bawdy romps based on "The Decameron", "The Canterbury Tales" and "The Arabian Nights". They are conceived very much in the same vein as the earlier "Gospel According to Saint Matthew" with the accent on realism rather than stylisation. Thus the ancient buildings and open landscapes often teem with crowds of people. The subject matter is of course very different, but what fun it all is! "The Decameron" is, to my mind, the most original of the three. It seems almost to be without form. Stories start and end abruptly, as if, having milked a tale of its naughtiness, the director is anxious to get on with another without the delay of a preamble. What I like most about the film is the sheer happiness of so many of the characters. Although some suffer embarrassing discomfort (the buffoon who falls up to his neck into a privy), most have a highly enjoyable old time; the young convent gardener for instance who, feigning deaf and dumbness, has it off with a procession of nuns, who in turn register the joy of having witnessed "a miracle" when he eventually decides to speak. But my favourites are the young couple who have a naked lovers' tryst on a rooftop. The girl tells her parents that she is going there to listen to the song of the nightingale. In a film where everyone is mainly happy even the parents register pleasure that their daughter has "caught her nightingale" when they discover the young couple nakedly fondling each other after what one can only imagine to have been the night of all nights of lovemaking from the blissful start we have witnessed.

Was ever a young couple more perfectly endowed! In a film where many, including some of the young, are gap-toothed, their smiles reveal perfect sets. I presume they are real!

There are at least hundreds of reasons why I like Il Decameron so unbelievably much, a film that, in retrospect, always feels like a whole night of various kinds of wonderful dreams. First of all, there is this incredible variety of faces and characters in those stories and episodes that are both, alternating comic and tragic. I especially love the episodes with the three brothers and their poor sister, the one with two "nightingales" on the roof top, the side plot with Franco Citti and, of course, the self-ironic part which Pasolini plays himself. I also like the two big long shots à la Bosch and Giotto (with my woman Silvana Mangano as Madonna in the latter). I like the film's rich choral fresco, the joyful and sensual atmosphere which surrounds the often bitter fate of the characters, the transformation of literary and cinematic material to an impudently carnal and physical matter, which consists of erections, stomachaches, hunger, excrements. I like how the film laughs about life and sexuality and frequently meets death.

There's always a constant, circuiting movement where all characters are driven by the desire to improve their living conditions and to fulfill their wishes. While doing so, they come to know betrayal and disappointment and therefore reckon with the reality of a world that is mean and unfair to them. There are the rich and the poor (such as Lisabetta and her brothers and Lorenzo), the smart and the naive, the saints and the sinners, the self-pleasing and the troublemaker. Those crowd scenes that often connect the episodes of all these swarming people and colours, where always a special incidence of light, a striking gesture of a figure, an effective angle catches the eye, are especially beautiful. And finally there's the cut with these smooth counterparts of environment and human figure, of static takes and wild tracking shots (i.e. the wonderful chase in the woods of Lorenzo and the three brothers with its sudden standstill, the transition of the lightness of the play to an ominous shadow). And the shots of Ninetto silently dancing himself outside the church or Lisabetta hugging the plant pot with tears running down her cheek are the ones I will never forget.

The Decameron fmovies. Film lovers know "Andrei Rublov," that Russian film about an icon painter. The beauty of the film comes in part because the filmmaker is on the same quest as his character, and that quest has as its core the discovery of beauty. The interesting thing about movies is that they create and sustain a fantasy world that lives beyond any one movie and into which we assume each movie is born. That world has its own type of beauty, one born of color and glamor and poise.

Paosolini does the same thing as Tarkovsky, but where Tarkovsky dealt with cosmic beauty and recognition, this artist has simpler goals: to engage with flesh, to flow with the simple streams of ignoble daily motion, and to discover beauty in that plain world.

Oh, what a terrific cinematic place to visit! This is a far from that collection of movie metaphors and beauty as we can go. There is no movie acting here. There is no external beauty. There is no recourse to familiar characters or representation. As usual, he draws his source material from matter that is not only before cinema, but before any popular writing.

And he works with that material outside any movie tricks. Well, he still has that Italian tendency to believe that the world is populated by characters and not situations or any sort of fateful flow. Just people who do things. Lots of little things, usually associated with pleasure.

So if you are building a world of cinematic imagination you need to have this as one of your corners. That's silly, every one of us is building a cinematic imagination — we cannot avoid it. What I mean to say is that if you are building an imagination, some of which you understand and can use, some of which you actually want and can enjoy without being sucked into reflex...

If you want to just relate to people as people and test how easy it is to find grace in the strangest of faces, then this is your movie voyage for the night.

One rather shocking thing is how the nudity works. In "ordinary" film, we thing nothing of seeing two people humping and moaning, nude pelvises grinding is the most hungry of ways. But we gasp when some genital is shown. Here, the exact reverse is found: no shyness about the obvious existence of genitals, an erection even. A sleeping girl with her hand in her lover's crotch. DIsplayed as if it were in the same cinematic territory as the faces he finds.

But when these characters lay on each other for sex, we have the most prurient of actor's postures. I think this was done simply to avoid an automatic sweep into ordinary film ways. It has that effect anyway.

I don't know anyone that chooses more interesting faces. Distinctly Southern European, odd atypical faces.

And finally, there is the bit of his own story inserted, the artist in the church. Creating scenarios of rich life. In the movie, the most amazing scenes are those that have little or nothing to do with the story. There's a "death" tableau that could be the richest single shot I have ever seen, anywhere.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Pasolini is the only one of my cherished filmmakers who does not have a film in my list of greats, a weird thing. I love how he makes films but the main narrative thrust as carried in the long arch is usually so obvious, so extrovertly Italian, exposing modern absence of purpose in Teorema, human self-delusion here, that it seems like something we always knew.

But he is a master of sculpting cinematic air, and this is a truly intelligent work of the medium, and not for any point it makes for sexual freedom or against religion.

A few of the individual joys first, because he is so joyous to watch. The faces he finds, such astonishingly expressive Italians. they are not actors in the ordinary sense, they do not mask deeply troubled soul in the coy way of puritans like Bergman. They are human sculptures, each one seemingly handpicked as exuberant fresco of earthy, toothless mirth. His sense of place is naked, unadorned, discovered; unlike so many Merchant Ivory or Hollywood period pieces, I feel like I inhabit this world. His camera, again unadorned, even sloppy at times, but as revelatory as anyone's.

In all these he teases the same spontaneous quality, that is what gives his work a certain careless air; but that is being carried by inspiration, instead of fixating on appearance. As honest as it is vital, because it was not excessively tampered with. He does not impose, paint beauty from the outside, it inwardly springs from air, from the flow of tangible emotion in tangible space jolting us into direct experience. Herzog could do it while being magical, few others. The film is a comic-book, an operabuffa in its narrative, but it's not without gravity that is life, nor is this the same as that tired business of 'realism' favored by the unimaginative like Nolan.

Where it really soars is in the overall gaze, however pleasant, it is the gaze that elevates this to required viewing for me.

All you need to know about the film is that it is in the form of thematically linked stories, centered in medieval Naples with rascals and scoundrels caught in mischief, often sexual. It is both funny and poignant, a film made for the same rowdy people it depicts. As said, the deeper purpose of the work is so readily available, show the marvelously flawed human being in all its buffonery and self- delusion, we may be inclined to think it 'small'. I think the problem is largely ours, myself included—we often mistake complexity for intelligence, reason with words instead of seeing the formative fabric.

So this isn't complicated in what it says, but it is some of the most intelligent stuff I have seen.

Look at the film again. In each story someone is being deceived, as are we watching a film. In each story, as in the overall film, the lie or deception reveals a more penetrating truth about self. Various selves pursue truth (linked to freedom from the norm), sometimes against the restraints of the story, sometimes killed by the story, sometimes negotiated to be a part of the story. So the easiest thing to do, what many crass minds would do, is to emphasize the strongest emotion, despair in one story, hypocrisy in another, and pull on that to draw audience reactions. We'd still have pretty much the same point, human buffoonery.

It's all in Pasolini's multifaceted expression; in the first story with Andreuccio who came to buy horses, the poignant, ascetic lesson of 'thank god for losing your money' is uttered by two sneaky louts, so register

I haven't yet seen too many Pasolini films / I intend to do so though... I suppose many combine him with the disgusting Salo (100 days in Sodoma) but thats not the case here.

In Decameron is actually several shorts, 9 or so, a series of funny tales in medieval Italy with similar touch and atmosphere. The humour is great, we had various laughs in almost every single bit. Some of the humour might of course offend hardcore Christians, but this is by no means a minus in my book. Pasolini's assault to this eras ethics is truly a delight! And even if this dates back to 1971, the stories remain fresh and provocative as is, and this is the height of Pasolini's vision.

Many indicated this as erotic. Sure, there is much of full frontal male and female nudity, some of which quite stimulating, which might be too much for some. But this ain't no erotic film. There are stories which have not erotic element in - and there are nude scenes which function as laugh scenes. Overall, this is a multi-layered short-stories film. I RECOMMEND THIS TO ALL FANS OF COMEDY & European FILMS.