On a sunny day in Naples, a rich young man comes to the market to buy horses. He is tricked by a woman into believing he is her brother and he ends in the tank of the toilet, robbed and soiled. But escaping that trap he finds himself in the street and the scene turns fantastic. The women from their windows tell him to disappear and the men in the street tell him just the same. So there he runs away dressed in his underwear soaked in and perfumed with human feces. His descent to hell in a way. He hides from some nocturnal men in a barrel in some underground cellar but not for long. The men are thieves and they hire him on a mission and there the real film really starts. You will have to go and see it if you want to get the details. Who will die and who will survive, that is THE question in this cruel world. In this film you have to go down into all kinds of holes, tombs, caves, cellars. Pasolini has rewritten Boccaccio with the pen of Dante and he settles accounts with the church first of all, that Italian church that is rich though doing nothing, by doing nothing and exploiting the whole society. And society is then engaged in a simple game, that of recuperating all they can from that church, be it a benediction, be it an absolution, be it a rite of some sort but also some of the stolen money they carry in their clerical purses. So Pasolini makes his characters steal from the dead bishop, and thus steal from his stealing surviving mates. Then they steal from the people in the street, purse pickers they are. They steal some good cheer, comfort, and pleasure from the hypocritical nuns, at least as long as youth grants the young man with enough potency and power and hardness to be able to satisfy the hunger of twenty nuns. They make false confessions not to save their souls but to look good in society when they die and save some trouble to their friends. And of course they steal as much pleasure as they can and absolutely disregard the idea that it may be a sin. Never mind the sin provided we have the pleasure. And this Italy is the Italy of all crimes, of all murders and embezzlements. And of course they all manage to get through but Hell is the destination of them all and the vision of that Hell is superb and in the tradition of its representations in the churches of the end of the 15th century, after the big plague, the Black Death. And yet poetry haunts this film in the very excess it demonstrates. Excess in the language, intonations that you have to enjoy in Italian of course, but also excess in the body language, especially, but not only, facial language. These Italians speak with their full bodies, particularly their hands and their faces. Excess in desire and passion, violence and hypocrisy. Even the morbidity of some scenes becomes artistic in its extreme sadness. And his vision of Hell is superb. Scatology transformed into a great art and that's just the point. The end of the film is the final vision of the fresco some master painter was painting in a church. That painter is the one who had the vision of hell but he transformed it into a civil and elegant scene full of majesty and nobility. He can regret the vision that was so beautiful but he could not render it on the wall of the church. A beautiful film though maybe slightly nostalgic and restrained, which means not entirely free-wheeling along the easy road Pasolini would have liked to be able to take but did not take entirely or in full light.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Irony, satire, ribald humor. good medieval earthy Italian peasant, church folk, nobility caricatures of getting one over on the next guy. Lots of twist backs.
Modern day: Roald Dahl (no n)
The stories don't segue, they just start and end.
Blunt, upfront, in your face tales of human nature that has survived the centuries since the book was first written during the time of the plague.

Lots of sexual innuendos, body parts shown so not recommended for kids. Or for the up-tight.

The book is terrific, short tales, 100 of them, that can be spread over days so as not to overdose. turn it off, do something else, watch over several nights.

Really terrific makeup gives a glimmer of dental health back in those days.

The Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971)

Yes, I get that Pasolini was supposed to be transgressive and all that stuff. And yes, I get the whole realism thing. But I don't see (and, in my admittedly limited exposure to Pasolini, have yet to see) why transgression and realism in the name of art are supposed to give one a pass on making a good movie. Fernando Meirelles managed both transgression and realism quite nicely in City of God, and what makes it a great film is that it is those things and a movie from which you can't tear your eyes. The Decameron? I could have stopped it at any time to go have dinner. Or tie myself to a termite mound covered in wood shavings.

Pasolini adapts nine Decameron tales here, and to be fair, the source material isn't exactly deathless. (Perhaps the adaptation of some of the weaker tales-- some of them nothing more than one-liners-- is part of the whole quest-for-realism thing?) But scads of directors and screenwriters have taken mediocre source material and made great film from it, so I can't really give Pasolini a pass on that, either. What is inarguable is Pasolini's eye for composition, and if you're a fan of the visuals more than anything else in a movie, this may work well for you; the movie does work better when considered as a series of still lifes captured on film. But, once again, this has been done many times while still making a coherent (and sometimes brilliant; Julian Schnabel is wonderful at this) movie.

Maybe someday I'll get why Pasolini is supposed to be so great, but today isn't the day. **

[ed. note: after reading another review of this particular edition, it seems that some scenes have been cut out that might have made things a touch clearer; perhaps I'll try and find another edition, then amend this.]

I am too lazy to read subtitles... Also this is NOT The Decameron... it is merely a few selected stories from the book. The back story isn't there which is a shame. I do like it though, but I have to watch it several times to get the whole thing since I am reading the whole time!

Pasolini freely adapts ten or so episodes from Boccaccio's fourteenth century collection of hundred short stories. He interweaves the tales of happy or tragic lovers, naughty nuns and lusty priests, naive husbands and cheating but quick-witted wives, inept grave robbers, and a young gardener who got more than he had bargained for, with his own meditations on art, life, death and love. Pasolini himself plays a painter Giotto who observes the characters that inspire him to paint a fresco on the church's wall. In the end of the film Pasolini's Giotto comments that it may be better to dream about a work of art than to actually produce it.

"Decameron" is the first part of Pasolini's "Trilogy Of Life", which continues with adaptations of two other celebrated works of world fiction; "The Canterbury Tales" (1972) and the "Arabian Nights" aka "A Thousand and One Nights" (1974). All these books have been known as distinguished and revered works of literature that belong to the immortal classics. There are probably so many big volumes have been written about them that it would take more than a thousand and one days and nights to read them. They talk about love, death, the meaning of life, and religion but first and most of all - they entertain. At the time they were told and written down, no one would think of them as the future academic references. That's why they are so alive, earthy, coarse, and bold. I have not seen two other Pasolini's films but 'Decameron' captures the original spirit of Boccaccio's tales truthfully and with love, humanity, and perfect sense of the medieval Italy.

The film has a look of a renaissance painting - not only Italian Renaissance (Giotto) but Netherlandish Northern Renaissance - Peter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch.

Full of rustic comedy and innocence, earthy humor and lust for life -"Decameron" is one of the most optimistic, and celebrating life films ever made. Its sexuality is straightforward and honest, moving and not insulting. This film, my first Pasolini made me want to see the rest of the trilogy and the rest of his films.

4.5/5