The Decameron

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.

This is the first of Pasolini's three feature-film adaptations of obscene tales of antiquity, the other two being "The Canterbury Tales" and "The Arabian Nights." It contains ten of Boccaccio's most famous tales… The bawdiest story concerns a merchant who back-doors his partner's wife by promising to tell her his secret of turning a woman to a female horse and back to a woman again...

The tale of the two lovers sleeping together on the terrace is quite nice and very erotic, but the most hilarious one involves a young man who pretends he's a deaf mute in order to get into a convent... Once inside, he discovers that the sisters are very curious about all the excitement the world has made over sex and want to find out if it is worth it...

The stories are quite funny and the acting is adequate especially for non-professionals… But the film's charm is in its unrefined energy…It spends as much time showing nude men as it does showing nude women, which was quite unusual for its time

After adapting "Gospel according to Saint-Matthews" as no one had done before (and after ) him ,in a drastically anti-Hollywood style ("greatest story ever told" and the Italian's opus are worlds apart),Pasolini brushed away the cobwebs from Greek myths such as "Oedipe" and "Medea".Then he began his trilogy of life which would also encompass "the Canterbury tales" and "fiore della mille e una notte".

"Il decameron" is the first and it created the surprise in 1971:no one had been as bawdy as Pasolini at the time (and I wonder if someone had since).This is a movie made up of little sketches ,all adapted from

Boccacio and they respect the original stories (notably the" nightingale" segment)Probably the funniest of the trilogy,and the happiest -both "Canterbury" and "mille e una" feature some dark scenes :a gay is burned alive in the former,an adolescent's murdered in the latter.

That said,"Il decameron" and the two other parts are not for all tastes:bawdiness,vulgarity and scatology may repel some.

Pier Paolo Pasolini has with the Decameron what is supposedly one of his "happiest" movies. This is not to say the film is always cheery- matter of fact a couple of the stories deep down are pretty dark and sad and cursed thanks to the repression of religion and mortal sins- but Pasolini's comedy here is sharp and his wit comes out in the obscene or in the random. It's a little like Bunuel only with a more earthy sensibility with the locations and slightly less surreal situations; it doesn't mean that Pasolini is any less ambitious with treating the foibles and stringent ways of the Catholic Church.

The Decameron's only big liability, in my estimation, is that it could be easy to get lost in the structure Pasolini sets up; it's nine stories, ranging from a Sicillian being swindled after finding out he's a brother to a sister of royalty until he's covered in feces, to a supposedly deaf-mute boy who becomes the sex toy for a bunch of sex-starved nuns, to a supposed 'Saint' who fools a priest into thinking he's such with his lackluster confessional, to a girl being met by her boyfriend on the roof and then being (joyfully) caught by her parents since his family is wealthy. They're all interesting stories, more often than not, with even a really short piece like the priest attempting to seduce his friend's wife providing something amusing or eye-catching visually.

But, again, all of these stories go from one into the next without much warning, and one may wonder when the next story really begins or if it's a continuation of the last. As it turns out, like the Phantom of Liberty, it's very stream-of-consciousness and one skewering of morality and sex can bleed easily into the other. And yet some may find this to be a more daring strength than others; certainly it's a very funny movie (if not quite as funny as Pasolini's masterpiece The Hawks and the Sparrows), like with the bit of the guy caught in the tomb, to the frankness of the parents asking the boy to marry their daughter on the rooftop - even just the strange feeling one gets watching the painter (played by, I think, Pasolini himself) in the act of creating an unusual but unique work on a church wall.

The greatest thing of all, for fans of the subversive, is that nothing is out of bounds for Pasolini, via his source material of the Boccaccio book, and he never is one to ever shy away from sex. That's also another asset this time around- unlike Arabian Nights we get some actually erotic bits thrown in the midst, if unintentionally, and on occasion (i.e. the shot following Lorenzo as he runs by the fence) the director conjures something powerful amidst the medieval/surreal/neo-realist pastiche. 8.5/10

The first of what became Pier Poalo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life, with each film adapting stories from archaic literature. In this case, Giovanni Boccaccio's book of the same name, written in 14th century Italy. The film takes nine of the 100 stories from the book and weaves them into vignettes of everyday Medieval life. We see nymphomaniac nuns, grave robbing, deceit, and cuckolding. In one segment, a boy is lured into the house of a pretty girl. She tells him that he is her brother. however, after taking his clothes and money, the boy is thrown out, where he is picked up by a couple of thieves who recruit him to climb inside of a tomb and steal the recently dead archbishop's ruby ring. The boy is left trapped in the grave.

This bawdy romp is a lot of fun. This was a surprise being Pasolini. The portmanteau style storytelling works well with this roaming tour through a debauched, ancient landscape. Many of the oddball characters were non- actors (something Pasolini had used throughout his career), and some have such incredibly rickety teeth, and are a strange and uncomfortable, yet thoroughly enjoyable watch.

The film ends with a statement by Pasolini himself (he played the painter, Giotto between, and within some of the stories), which is possibly a statement about the dream like quality the narrative has in its assemblage of the parts. He says: Why create a work of art, when you can just dream about it? Indeed, why create narrative cinema, when you can manoeuvre through scenes of life and create a patchwork of living, permeated with verisimilitude.

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