Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini
I watched this as part of a Pasolini retrospective in the 2003 Singapore International Film Festival, and I should note that the very idea of a Pasolini retrospective is great, even if the Powers That Be insisted on cuts that meant one of the films (The Arabian Nights) had to be cancelled. On to Pasolini’s version of the Boccaccio classic. I didn’t really like the Ciappelletto story that is one of the two framing stories: yes, I understand, in Pasolini’s version Ciappelletto (Franco Citti) makes the sacrifice that allows the northern usurers and the Church to glorify him and thus prolong their control over the masses. But the Marxism seems a bit overt, and I don’t like being beaten in my head with overt politics (this, incidentally, is my objection to most Michael Moore films - I think he ends up only preaching to the converted). Certainly I thought the class criticism was subtler - and thus better - in the two consecutive stories of Caterina, whose lover, the rich Ricciardo, is merely forced to marry her when they’re caught having sex, and Elisabetta, whose lover is killed by her brothers because the lover is a poor labourer. And of course any sprawling text like the Decameron allows for a wide treatment of various subjects, which Pasolini does very well, full of warmth for the characters - the story of the nuns taking turns screwing the gardener could be read as Pasolini’s take on church hypocrisy, but then the subject of oversexed nuns has been popular since mediaeval times, and it could also just be seen as a really funny story. Actually, the bawdy sex bits in the film were all great, with a sense of play that I thought felt true to the spirit of Boccaccio’s text and to the spirit of mediaeval literature.
I thought it was interesting that lots of the characters had that harsh Sicilian accent (okay, I’m guessing Sicilian because I spent a day or two walking around London with these two Sicilian women who spoke almost no English, and so that’s my impression of what the accent sounds like) - southern Italy gets featured so rarely in films. I guess I’m interested in periphery-core relations within nation-states, or just seeing versions of views of a country that I haven’t seen much before… Incidentally, Pasolini himself appeared as the painter, and looked really buff on film.