As Mil e Uma Noites

"Fiore delle mille e una notte" ,which won special prize at CANNES 1974 is the third part of what Pasolini called the trilogy of life which encompasses "il decameron" (1971) and" racconti di Canterbury" (1972). It's the most accessible of all Pasolini movies ,and weren't it for the numerous nudities,it would appeal to large audience.

This must be the script:it's much better than the two first films because the story is built à la Shéhérazade ,with plots ,subplots and subsubplots which fit into each other;and although sex is the main vector,it features enough twists to sustain the interest throughout.It does not forget magic (the segment which features Ninetto Davoli,Pasolini's favorite actor,uses a lot of symbols)and mystery (the adolescent who must be killed when he's fifteen ).Humor is less vulgar than in "di racconti di Canterbury" The little riddle "the aromatic grass of the fields" "the slit pomegranate" and "the inn of the warm welcome " is witty.

Little did we know that Pasolini would follow his trilogy of life with the most depressing work ever made :"Salo" (1975).

'Il Fiore delle mille e una notte', or 'Arabian Nights', is Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film from his "trilogy of life" and his second to last film in general. His last of course is 'Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom', the controversial first film from his "trilogy of death".

With 'Arabian Nights' Pasolini combines a couple of stories from the book 'A Thousand and One Nights' into one story, although the film itself still feels very episodic. All parts of the story deal with love, or actually I should say lust, ending in sex. Especially the penis gets enough screen time here, it might as well be the leading character. The sex scenes themselves are, in my opinion, not very sensual or erotic (although they admittedly are when you compare them to such scenes in any other Pasolini film) which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes exactly that when more than half the movie exists out of them.

On the other hand the film is pretty entertaining, mostly for its oddness. That again, is something we see in almost any other Pasolini film. His distant approach adds to that feeling, especially when he shows violent images. One might not expect them in a film that arguably celebrates love and sex. Another factor for the oddness is the terrible acting, especially from the men. Maybe good acting is impossible for them here since Pasolini presents them as a bunch of whiners who would do anything for love. Of course, once again, with love I mean sex. The Italian language in the Eastern setting is another thing that feels pretty weird as well. All these elements add to the oddness which makes the film more entertaining than it probably should have been.

I have to conclude with saying that I sort of admire Pasolini. I think only his 'Il vangelo secundo Matteo' can be considered as a truly great film, mostly since his approach is the distant one. I think that is a good thing when it comes to a religious film like that. that approach in his other films is not always the right one, but it is one aspect of why his films are different, often daring. Even when not much is happening, or when we have no clue what is happening, or when we normally would not care that much, Pasolini keeps it kind of interesting.

Pasolini is a wonderful, wonderful adventure. Welcoming him into your heart is not without cost; he's a friend who is brilliant on one side and captive to banality on the other.

The bad? Well, its tolerable for me because it is so flamboyantly obvious. The man has a triple curse: he is outrageously gay, he is insufferably Italian and (perhaps because of these two) he has excessively simpleminded storytelling skills. The stories here in their individual content have juvenile dynamics. The way the emotions are handled is comically simpleminded.

That's in the nature of the stories of course, but our man here takes them seriously, so overlain on this is his own sexual nature. These stories are, some of them, erotic in nature and all of them have desire as the driver. Among the various stories, he's chosen these and that's fine enough. The original stories were distributed in places all over the Islamic world, a huge reach, but all of them which included sex joked about the dissonance between Islmac attitudes towards sex and the actual lives of folks within.

But its rather interesting actually watching how his own predilections enter the story. Most of the men here are slaves to their own desires. But those desires are all — in the stories — skipping over the most superficial of erotic notions. A teenage boy awakes and finds an unconscious teenage girl next to him. He has sex with her. This is equated to "falling in love." It happens over and over and if you encounter these stories in text, its part of the fun.

But see how Pasolini himself enters the story in how he chooses to portray the erotic content. Nudity and youth stand for the erotic, especially the nude boy. When sex is depicted (less than you would expect from the stories) its amazing wooden, mannikins. I suppose if you made some still images of parts of this it would be erotic, but repeatedly seeing the male member of a cartoon tells me that director has the same foibles as the characters we see.

The Good? Well there's more than enough of that to make up for the sexual inadequacies of that part of the world.

There's the absolute beauty of the thing cinematically. It isn't fully cinematic in motion, since Pasolini has no notion of how things flow, what the rhythms of things are. But each shot is fulfilling and some are absolutely breathtaking. He doesn't have any static tableaux like the striking ones in "Matthew," but the visual elegance is erotic in itself. Its a sort of continuous penis shot of life, and you'll find the beauty of the places erotic in their own ways, And then there's the way the stories are crafted.

Yes they are cartoonish. Yes, they have execrable pacing, almost as if they were found objects and put in inappropriate boxes. But the way they are tied one to another is nothing short of brilliant. If we had none of the beauty, and none of the amusement of watching an Italian fop struggle on screen, we'd still have this. And its great.

There isn't any one mechanism that links the stories; there may be a dozen. There isn't any sense to about half of them, and that's part of the miracle. Sometimes they are inside one another, but sometimes they walk through each other. Sometimes it is the same place of extras. Sometimes a repeated situation; "don't eat from that plate." Sometimes it is simply a segue that has no narrative connection at all but just seems nested or siblinged in some way. Its "Sarogossa Manuscript" with fun and beauty.

I must say that one story really is perfect. It alone has two really beautiful women acting erotically. It has expert pacing. It is funny: laugh out loud funny. And it has a punishment that is one of the most arresting images you'll see — if you are a guy. Plus it has a framing story that makes me think it was the first one adapted and filmed.

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

Whether or not you like some (or just respond positively to some) of Pier Paolo Pasolini's work, or you don't, will depend on how much one can take of provocative subject matter put forward in an upfront manner. For me, he's a director that can go both ways, be it completely muddled and pretentious (Teorema) or almost boring in its S&M tactics of twisted satire (Salo), or actually dramatically engaging (Mamma Roma), and he's never someone who takes the easy road. Arabian Nights is another one, as part of a 'trilogy' of films adapted from famous, erotically-laced works of stories that have scandalized for centuries (the others the Decameron and Canterbury Nights). Once again, Pasolini has a lot of people in his film that aren't actors, or even real extras- sometimes some people will just pop out, or a bunch of kids will run around, and they're plucked right from the scenery. If authentic, film fans, is what you want, Pasonili gives it, in all of the style of a guy out to shoot a documentary on the people in these settings and gets (pleasantly) sidetracked by a bunch of crazy-tragic stories of love and lust in the desert.

As if done in a pre-Pulp Fiction attempt at non-linear storytelling, we get the tale of Zumurrud (Ines Pellegini) and Nur ed din (Franco Merli), one a slave who is bought by the most innocent looking kid in the bunch of bidders. They fall in love, the wise young girl and naive grunt, but they get separated after she gets sold to another man. She escapes, but becomes the unwitting king after she is mistaken for a man. Meanwhile, her young little man is calling after her/him, and getting into his own trouble. Through this framework, we get other stories told of love lost and scrambled; a sad and silly story of a man who's engaged to his cousin, and is thwarted by a mysterious woman who gets his attention, which leads him down a path of semantics (yes, semantics, poetry-style) and sex, leaving his much caring cousin behind. Then there's the man who woos a woman who is under the ownership of a demon, and once their affair is discovered some unexpected things happen via the Demon (Franco Citti, maybe the most bad-ass character in the film despite the surreal-aspect of the showdown). And then one more story, which, hmm....

I could go on making descriptions, but then this wouldn't be much of a review of praise of the picture. Suffice to say it's one of Pasolini's strongest directed efforts, where he's surefire in his consistent usage of the hand-held lens, getting his actors to look sincere through dialog that is half ripped-from-the-pages and half with the sensibility of Pasolini as a poet (yes, I went there in the whole 'he's a poet' thing, but he is in a rough-edged and melodramatic timing and flow). He's also going for an interesting combo; neo-realist settings for a good chunk of the picture, set in and around real locations in areas that don't need much production design, and an epic sweep that includes many extras, some special effects at times (and how about that lion!), and extravagant costumes.

I also liked- if not loved- how Pasonili dealt with sex and more-so the human body itself. It would probably rightfully get an NC-17 if released today in America, and got an X when released in 1980. The dreaded 'thing' of a man is revealed about as often as a cut-away to a master shot of a building. Everything, in fact, is filmed frankly, without the style that tip-toes around the starkness of two people embraced and naked. But it's also not pornographic either; if anything Pasolini perhaps doesn't direct far enough with the sex, as one body just lays still on top of another. There's a specific intent to dealing with sexuality in this world that respects lust and desire from the original text without making it blatant- only in one big instance, involving the fate of the man from the cousin story (the one with Aziz I think) revels in the horror of sex that was delved tenfold in Salo. Add to this the exquisite score from Ennio Morricone, who enriches any scene his score pops up, as a mandolin strings away and the strings rise with just a hint of the sentimental. Without Morricone, in fact, it might not be as emotional a film, when need be.

And lest not forget Arabian Nights can be strangely comical, where Pasolini throws it back at the audience that he knows he's going (rightfully) into the surreal. Like with the story of the Demon and the fate of a man transformed as a chimpanzee, or the vision with the lion, or even the dialog in the pool with the three girls and the man, which is humorous while keeping a tongue-in-cheek. And there's even some good jokes to come out of the obvious step of having Zummurrud as the 'King' when it's clear as day from the Italian dubbing that he's the 'she', so to speak, as it stretches out into a final scene where lovers are united and things are as they should be, however much the director is thumbing his nose at power and sex and the dealings of the heart with organs. Arabian Nights probably couldn't be made today, but could anyone else but Pasolini make it anyway? There's daring in this film, and through the exotic exteriors and sets we see a filmmaker working along like there's nothing else to stop him, for better or worse. This time for the better.

Surely there's a lot to admire and enjoy in this movie: the settings and costumes are extremely colourful, the locations exotic, at times almost dreamlike, and at several times there are stunning mass-scenes. All this makes watching it a dazzling and overwhelming experience. But - at least with me - this movie also evokes bewilderment, confusion and irritation.

Using local amateurs can give a feeling of authenticity, but here is such an abundance of amateurism that it gets on your nerves. Many of the cast don't seem to act at all, but just obediently follow orders: they either loiter about or run around frantically, they grin sheepishly or feign to cry, they rattle their obviously later dubbed Italian lines in mostly loud and high-pitched voices, and then sooner or later (mostly sooner) they take their clothes off, that's about it. The musical score is very strange and uneven, at some parts beautiful music (Morricone!), at other times there are long streches of bland silence. Strangely enough never Arabian-sounding music, which couldn't have been hard to find around the locations where they filmed.

I don't mind a bit of nudity and sex, but this is really way over the top: every guy that pops around the corner is stark naked within a minute or two and runs around like that for the rest of the film. And mind you, this is a 1974 movie that actually won a renowned prize (in Cannes)! What on earth is the point of all this exhibitionism, there are numerous instances where there appears to be no functional motivation for it whatsoever.

Maybe Pasolini liked to create confusion and bewilderment. It's only a bit hard to admire this film for just that and for the enchanting cinematography.