The Decameron [DVD]

Amazon.com A collection of bawdy tales from Boccaccio, adapted and directed by the taboo-busting Pier Paolo Pasolini--sounds irresistible, doesn't it? Pasolini approaches the material not like a literary classic to be reverently served, but rather as if the various anecdotes were episodes from scruffy, everyday life in medieval Italy, caught on the fly, like neighborhood gossip recounted in a taverna. The film is black-sheep kin to the director's amateur-theatrical take on Scripture, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964); both films abound in earthy settings framing vivid faces that might have gazed out of a Renaissance painting. Yet where Gospel was searing, The Decameron is perfunctory. Most of the stories dribble away absentmindedly before they've even begun to establish a situation, let alone any tension. Pasolini himself reappears periodically as an artist--Giotto--planning an epic cathedral painting. At the end, he's still thinking about it and wondering, "Maybe it's enough to dream a masterpiece rather than paint it." Which seems a handy copout for not really making the film we've been trying to watch. --Richard T. Jameson Product Description Legendary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini delivers nine exuberant tales in this "earthy, genuinely ribald and spicy" (Variety) film. Based on Boccaccio's timeless classicand the first in Pasolini's Trilogy of Life series - The Decameron is an uproariously "irreverent romp" (Variety) that's "positively jubilant in its naughtiness" (Films and Filming)! Lusty nuns who perform sexual "miracles," a cheating wife with a head for business, a dying con artist attempting a heavenly swindle, young lovers caught with their pants down, a servent who loses his head for love and a gullible farmer who tries to turn his wife into a mare. These are just some of the stories Pasolini vividly brings to life!