THE DECAMERON (1971)

Gay Catholic Marxist filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini made three films he called the Trilogy of Life, all based on famous collections of earthy morality tales from the past, the other two being THE CANTERBURY TALES and ARABIAN NIGHTS. In all three, the frame stories are more or less ignored (less so in CANTERBURY). In Boccaccio's original Decameron, ten people who have decamped from Florence to the countryside to escape the Black Death tell each other stories, some lewd, some allegorical. Here, several of the stories are told with no single frame or link. Instead, we are plunged into the world of (what I assume to be) 14th century Italy as we see a young man, Ciappelletto, murder someone and hide the body. Though we will come back to him later, the focus shifts to Andreuccio, a curly haired guy in tight pants who is visiting Naples. A beautiful woman sees him and tells him that she is his half-sister. She offers to put him up for the night, but when he has to use the bathroom, he is directed to a doorway which leads to a huge pit of excrement. The woman steals his money and he runs off into the night in his soiled nightclothes, and winds up involved with two thieves trying to steal jewels from the tomb of a recently deceased archbishop. Andreuccio climbs in the large stone tomb and tosses jewels out to the men but keeps a particularly valuable ring for himself. Suspecting what he's done, the two men close him up in the tomb and leave. How he gets out provides the climax of the story.

There are many more stories (mostly bawdy) told with more or less random links between them. Ciappelletto pops up later—on his deathbed, he scams a priest into declaring him a holy man despite being a thief, a rapist, and a homosexual. Pasolini himself shows up halfway through as an artist hired to paint a fresco in a church, and returns at the end having only done two of the three wall panels, declaring, "Why complete a work when it’s better just to dream it?" Which might be a good reason for adapting only about ten of the original 100 stories of the Decameron. The tale which is the most fun involves a young man who hears of a job opening as a gardener at a convent. He pretends to be a deaf-mute so his handsomeness won't put off the Mother Superior. He is hired, but he proves to be a source of temptation to the nuns (we see him up on a ladder with two nuns ogling his crotch) and soon the nuns are lining up waiting for his stud services. The upshot is too good to spoil here. There is also an interesting twist on a Romeo & Juliet story—a young maiden is in love, or at least lust, with a handsome man whom she thinks her parents won’t approve of. One warm summer night, she decides to sleep on an outdoor terrace to cool off, but it's actually so her young man can visit and spend the night. The next morning, the two are caught naked (she is holding his genitals, leading the father to say that she has caught a nightingale in her hand) but the outcome is happy rather than sad. A more tragic tale involves a woman whose brothers decapitate her lover; she then buries his head in a basil plant pot. 

There is nudity and simulated sex galore, including one shot of a tumescent penis, and the settings look appropriately grungy and muddy. The stories are a mixed bag, and things rather arbitrarily just grind to a halt, perhaps reflecting Pasolini's belief about unfinished art. The actors are used more for their faces and bodies than talent, but some of the more attractive cast members are Giuseppe Arrigio as Lorenzo (pictured above left, who winds up under the basil plant), Vincenzo Amato as the gardener, Ninetto Davoli as the thief caught in the tomb, and Francesco Gavazzi (at right) and Elisabetta Genovese as the terrace lovers. Franco Citti, who had a long career in Italian films and had a small role in two of the Godfather movies, plays Ciappelletto. Some viewers of the Trilogy of Life claim that the movies celebrate earthy humanity, which it does, but there is plenty of undeserved death and suffering too. I’ll review the others in the next few days; in general, I'd recommend these films more as interesting curiosities than must-see movies. This in a second-shot review; I reviewed it first in March 2007. [Criterion Channel]