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: #26273 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-11-05
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Italian
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 112 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

This is a bad edition of Pasolini's magnificent film
Boccacio's Decameron consisted of ten realistic stories told by travelers during the plague. Pasolini tied them together and reframed them within the theme of art-does-not-imitate-life. This DVD cut out some scenes essential for understanding the film (e.g., dinner with water melons in the first story, The Invitation), and sanitized certain erotic ones (e.g., Mute Gardener). It is also a pity that the stories have been edited back-to-back without breaks or subtitles so that the viewer not familiar with the original is left guessing where one story ends and another begins. But the greatest injustice to Pasolini is in cutting out most of the final scene that ties all the stories together and gives them a meaning. In that scene real-life thieves, pedophiles, grave-robbers, murderers, adulterers, con artists, and blasphemers - the stories' characters - are shown depicted on cathedral frescos as saints, angels, and archangels by the starry-eyed painter. At the very least, the buyer should be warned that this DVD is an abridged version of the original, and that its editors took poetic licence with it.

Probably Pasolini's best
Pasolini's first film in his "Trilogy of Life". It tells nine separate tells from the book "The Decameron". All have a very ribald sense of humor and has a surprising amount (for an R rated film) of male and female nudity. Not for anyone who is easily offended but a fairly good film for those who are interested. Also there are a few really huge swipes at the Catholic Church--one story has a convent of nuns using a man to sexually satisfy all of them--and this is shown in a positive light!

An entertaining tour through mediaeval Italy
This is the first film in Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life" (the others being "The Canterbury Tales" and "Arabian Nights"). It contains eight tales from Boccaccio's mediaeval work, filmed with Pasolini's usual mixture of realism and visual beauty. The natural locations used here also give a lift to these stories combining love, lust, deception, murder, and religion.

As is common in his films, Pasolini has used a combination of non-professional actors and regulars, including Franco Citti in the 'false saint' story, and Ninetto Davoli as a man whose luck goes through several reverses before he comes out on top. Pasolini himself also appears as the mediaeval painter Giotto.

"The Decameron" is quite bawdy, although it never reaches the heights scaled by "The Canterbury Tales" in this department. On the plus side, however, it's in the original Italian (with English subtitles), so it doesn't suffer from the poor dubbing that afflicts "The Tales".

"The Decameron is weakened a bit by the disjointed editing. I'm not sure whether the original film was like that, or if this version used for the DVD was chopped about in some way. Even so, it's an entertaining film with varied stories and a nice period atmosphere.