The Decameron (Il Decameron)
|  The Decameron (Il Decameron), the first of the three films that would come to be known as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life,” is based on nine stories from the canonical 14th-century work of the same name by Giovanni Boccaccio. Pasolini discarded the frame story of seven young women and three young men spinning the tales after having fled the plague and moved the action from Florence to Naples, but he truly makes the material his own by imbuing it with his fervent beliefs in the “innocence” of bodies uncorrupted by modernity, the evils of the bourgeoisie and other wealthy classes, and personal freedom through sexual liberation. Unlike any of Pasolini’s previous works, The Decameron is a bawdy, raucous film that revels in the flesh—both literally in terms of the numerous stories involving unbridled sexuality and metaphorically in terms of the film’s appeal to vulgar comedy.The film is ultimately as scattershot in its effectiveness as it is scattershot in its organization; at times it achieves nearly sublime heights (or, more accurately, lows) of grubby humor and vitality, but at other times it feels strained and slapdash, with Boccaccio’s ribaldry coming off like soft-core porn clichés. Several of the stories are little more than set-ups for a sex-related gag, particularly the one in which a woman convinces her cuckolded husband to hide inside a giant jar so she can continue the sexual tryst that her husband’s unexpected arrival interrupted. Similarly, a story about a young man who pretends to be deaf and mute in order to get work in a convent exists solely to “reveal” that all nuns are really sexually starved nymphomaniacs who literally wear the poor guy out with their demands for constant lovemaking. The story of sexually curious nuns is only one of many jabs Pasolini takes at the Catholic Church, which he presents as being full of either simpletons or hypocrites. In one of two stories Pasolini intercuts throughout the film, an unabashedly sinful reprobate named Ciappelleto convinces a gullible priest on his deathbed that he has been so beatific and virtuous in life that he is buried as a saint. Gullibility is replaced by lechery in a later story in which a priest uses a story that he can turn his mare into a woman and then back again to have sex with his peasant friend’s wife. The juvenile nature of the film’s swipes at Catholic authority figures fits with its overall tenor of the carnivalesque, but it feels somehow beneath Pasolini, whose complicated relationship to Christianity (he was an avowed Marxist but also revered his staunchly Catholic mother and even made a reverent film about Christ, 1964’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, for her) will probably never be fully untangled. Much better are the stories that that involves characters who are more than simply caricatures and stereotypes and use sex as something other than a punchline. In one story, a pair of young lovers sleep together on the terrace of her parents’ house, and when they are discovered, her peasant father is ecstatic rather than angry because the young man comes from a wealthy family into which his daughter can now marry. The contrast between the young couple’s genuine affection for each other and the father’s immediate desire to cash in on their romance is a stark reminder of Pasolini’s disgust with how everything—people included—can become commodified, an idea he would take to its disgusting literal ends in Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). The best story, however, is the one that has nothing to do with sex, and involves a young man who is robbed by a woman who pretends to be his long-lost sister and then joins a pair of thieves who are sneaking into a bishop’s tomb to steal his ring. In this story, Pasolini achieves a perfect balance of off-kilter humor and sly humanity; it’s the one story that feels completely loose and funny and clever. Of course, the stories themselves in The Decameron are only one part of its texture, as much of the film’s impact derives from Pasolini’s insistence on a raw visual realism that favors actual medieval locations, naturalistic camerawork (often handheld and with a decided lack of stylization, although he does draw obvious inspiration from the medieval paintings of Bosch and Brughel), and mostly amateur actors who seem to have been cast for their wrinkled visages and poor dental hygiene. The film is frequently beautiful in its coarseness, which paradoxically coexists with a clearly poetic sensibility forged in the age of neorealism. Yet, some of the film’s rougher edges, particularly its downright shoddy postproduction dubbing, sometimes distract from the overall effect, creating a sense of distance that does not feel intentional, despite Pasolini’s inserting himself in the film as nothing less than a master artist (ironic nod to self-reflexivity or ego-gratifying self-casting?) For Pasolini, the human body free of repressive institutions (namely the Church and capitalism) is the ultimate “innocence,” an ideal that is embodied in his various characters and how they engage their imperfectly perfect bodies in acts of lovemaking. (Unfortunately, Pasolini’s censors-be-damned daring unwittingly unleashed a hoard of soft-core imitators whose sleazy medieval sex farces jettisoned Pasolini’s political ambitions in favor of simplified titillation.) While many of his films from the 1960s were pessimistic and dour in their outlook, The Decameron is a decidedly joyous celebration of a premodern carnality that Pasolini sees as natural and humane—where we ought to be and what modern society keeps us from attaining. However, the very fact that he had to return to the medieval period in order to find it shrouds the film (and the rest of the “Trilogy of Life”) in an unmistakable nostalgia for something that was lost and will probably never be regained.
Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © The Criterion Collection and United Artists/MGM | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Decameron is available exclusively as part of the three-disc “Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life” box set (SRP $79.95), which also includes The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974). The box set is also available on DVD.Overall Rating: 
(2.5)
