The Decameron

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Teddy B It's a good thing Pasolini chooses to direct films mainly set decades or centuries ago, because that is the only context in which his somehow both artless and artful grubbiness actually makes sense. In Pasolini's films, especially his Trilogy of Life, he creates such a faithful depiction of how peasants from different times lived that it churns my stomach. 'The Decameron', being the first of this trilogy, has the most meat on its bones and the most to enjoy (with 'Arabian Nights' and 'The Canterbury Tales' deriving its humour ineffectively from cruder subjects). Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 04/30/25 Full Review Steve B Came to this film via the recent TV series which I was finding hard going and several reviewers recommending the Pasolini film instead and hailing it a masterpiece. Not sure what they were smoking but I beg to differ! Dreadful acting, incomprehensible story lines and script, wobbly camerawork and direction that made me appreciate the hugely improved production values since the 70s. Stuck it out to the end but wish I hadn’t…. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 09/13/24 Full Review jordan m It's a lot harder to review this movie when I'm doing it having watched Pasolini's entire Trilogy of Life, mostly because this one was actually quite good. The trilogy as a whole suffers massively from diminishing returns and the feeling that Pasolini's creativity was waning while his desire to exploit non-actors willing to debase themselves with extensive, non-artistic nudity was waxing. Perhaps the Decameron was better source material than the other two books he adapted, but I doubt it made much difference here. I found Pasolini to be similar to Lars von Trier in that there are people who squint so hard at his work that they see art and nuance and metaphor galore, whereas I mostly see them as spoiled manchildren who have never experienced proportionate consequences for their actions, who push the boundaries of decency solely to dare the world to ostracize them for it. I'm getting ahead of myself though. This was a pretty good movie; the trilogy doesn't really get awful until about halfway through the second movie. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member This is a film that reminds you what is special about cinema. Although based on a literary text, it is using the unique language of cinema to make something utterly unique. This film condenses abstract ideas about sex, religion, and art into something ecstatic and full of joy. A masterpiece. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/22/23 Full Review Audience Member In his insightful short essay on Pasolini's sensuous adaptation of the 14th-Century Tuscan classic, Colin MacCabe suggests that, for all the supposed literary pretension of its source material, central to the film is a shockingly mundane and unglamorous depiction of corporeality, particularly in all the browned, broken, and toothless smiles. By casting (not even amateur) non-actors with faces prima facie unacceptable by Hollywood standards and recasting Boccaccio's text in the Neapolitan dialect (as vulgar to the ears of wealthy Northern Italians today as the original Florentine was to Latinate audiences), Pasolini foregrounds the worldliness of his subject, fashioning a film that forgoes intellectual aspirations of most literary adaptations, instead favoring the experiences and entertainment of everyday working-class people, who make up both his cast and his audience. For a true Marxist like Pasolini, the poetic and the proletariat are not in opposition, but function here to complement one another through a celebration of real bodies "shorn of all the civilizing processes of the Renaissance," as MacCabe puts it, bodies unadorned, unconcealed, and unvarnished. If anything, this flagrant (and no doubt fragrant and flatulent) rendering of physical existence makes for a film truer to the ribald spirit of l'Umana Commedia than a more bookish and cultured adaptation that we might expect that sticks to the letter of the text, aiming as it does not just to bring Boccaccio's world to life, but bring new and sweaty life to the bourgeois world of staid academics Pasolini so rightly despised. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 01/30/23 Full Review júlio a Eu preciso re-ver para absorver tudo! Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Decameron

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