Los cuentos de Canterbury

Making a film about the Canterbuy Tales, one that lasts one to two hours, presents one with the decision of how to go about it.

The logical approach would be to tell of the pilgrimage itself, and then splice 2 or 3 tales at a time, probably beginning with the joke tales, like the miller's.

It would be doubtful that one could get all the stories in, and still have a pilgrimage tale.

Here, the pilgrimage is pretty much forgotten, just mentioned at the beginning.

The cuts between stories are sometimes straights cuts, and sometimes back to Chaucer writing the tale.

The bawdiness is kept, although it is done more Italian style than English. There is a mixture of the two cultures involved here.

The stories stay fairly true to form.

It would take a huge budget to include the squire's story, and indeed, the squire's story would take some interpretation to finish. Sadly, it is left out.

Which leaves the pardoner's story as the "thriller" story. I was very much hoping this story, a natural finale, would be the climax.

I wasn't disappointed. The pardoner's tale is the masterpiece in terms of action and adventure. It isn't exactly the very last tale, but close enough to serve as the climax, as there are two very brief joke tales that follow it.

Would I piece it together like this? Probably not. I think each person would direct this in a different way, with about a half dozen general methods.

However, I liked the way this film was done. It stayed very true to form, in my opinion. Most of the tales are "raunchy humor" tales, showing the mores of what one would expect to be puritan people, most of them professionals in religion. This was well done.

As far as where this one sits on the film map, it's somewhere between Belle de Jour and Tinto Brass's Caligula.

The most important credit Pasolini's setting of the Canterbury Tales deserves is for its dismissal of the usual on-screen morality. Such candor seems essential to the nature of such a narrative (being much more appreciated than the stifled decadence of Keir Dullea's Marquis de Sade or the early Warhol/Morrissey efforts). This is most effective because the film also depicts the baseness and depravity of the late Middle Ages. Everyone's fornicating or trying to fornicate everyone else, with lots of potty humor thrown in just to make sure that it wouldn't be taken too seriously as a foray into art-house pretensions.

On all other counts, it's overblown and a bit sluggish, with an especially disappointing outcome au montage son. And non-professional actors are much less effective in adding a dimension of realism than they are in inducing a sense of self-mockery. The imagery is shamelessly ribald although not extreme, and the storyline is far from seamless. Far from Pasolini's best, although perhaps a good preparation for the far more intense Salo.

This, even though it lacks a bit the wit and spirit of IL DECAMERON, which was funnier, it still manages to satisfy as you reach the end. Pasolini's perverted humor as well as some of his usual actors are here. There's full nudity, both male and female. Maybe here the erotic element is more intense so its less humorous, I am not sure. I suppose it will satisfy those who like Pasolini's humour like, say, IL DECAMERON.

The copy I saw had awful dubbing - Italian language- maybe it's bad sychronisation, or something else...

As far as I am concerned it is worth it alone for this special, absurd, perverted, surrealistic last scene, taking place in hell. It rulez! Some others scenes are awesome too! And of course there'e Pasolini evident dislike of church/religious dogmas.

If you're not easily offended and like old films, specially European ones, give it a try, IL DECAMERON as well.

This is the second in Pasolini's series of setting classic bawdy tales to film… In this case, he selected eight of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, including the infamous miller's tale and the incident with the red hot poker kiss…

The tales revolve around a group of pilgrims who are journeying to the shrine of Saint Thomas a Becket of Canterbury… The trip is so boring that they begin telling each other stories that soon get obscene, gory and very sexy… Pasolini adds another motif to his visualization by placing Chaucer himself into the movie, periodically cutting to him writing at his desk...

Pasolini inserts pleasure and amusement at social customs, especially marriage… Some of the stories are funny, others are deadly serious… The scene where a young man is burned for making love to another of his own sex, for example, is chilling...

In fact, Pasolini's using non professional actors, is more in keeping with the tone of the original than the usual romanticized versions...

If you watched this movie in order to get a crib of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, you'd be out of luck, and missing the point. Chaucer's underlying anti-clerical and pro-love-and-life philosophy may be there, but the substance is very different. Pasolini's 14th century England lives and dresses more like 16th Century Italy.

The Miller's Tale is much grimmer when brought to the screen than Chaucer would have intended. "And Nicholas is branded on the bum, And God bring all of us to Kingdom Come" in Coghill's cheerful popular translation, becomes something more like the execution of Edward II. Not just on, but in. And the execution of a sodomite too poor to bribe his way off the griddle seems drawn out just to make a bad joke about the seller of "griddle cakes" (frittelli) plying his trade in the crowd.

He is one of the more than fair share of handsome young men in the film, and there's more than a fair share of closeups of their middle regions, front and back, in tight-fitting breeches (not that I'm complaining).

One feature that is almost entirely absent is any sense of pilgrimage. The storytellers appear only at the beginning and end of the tale. Instead we cut back to Chaucer himself (Pasolini himself, and very handsome he is too), writing the tales at a snail's pace. There are also long (by 2006 standards) tracking shots over indifferent scenery. Yet other scenes jump disconcertingly, the start of one tale used to mark the end of the previous one.