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!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31267 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-11-05
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Italian
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 111 minutes

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

Customer Reviews

A muddle.
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.]

not in English... subtitles only...
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!

Innocence, Earthy Humor and Lust for Life

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