The first part of Pasolini's Trilogy of Life (Decameron, Canterbury Tales & Arabian Nights), this is filled with a bawdy, earthy spirit, this is a romanticization of medieval life that practically worships the lower classes for their lack of superciliousness. A tale of sex and death: Randy nuns, cuckolded husbands, murdered lovers and grave robbers. Here the director not only tries to show human beings as archetypes but also presents them in a prelapsarian, pre industrial past. Because Pasolini is not a naturalist, this does not represent the real past but are analogies to - and criticisms of - the present day. These are tales of basic human passions with no ideological axes to grind.
The usual (proto Christian) psychological conflict in Pasolini's work between the strictures of Roman Catholicism and the apparent liberation of Marxism; made flesh by the film's conclusion about fornication: "It's not a sin!" The director's basic view is that one should accept life as a joy rather than a burden to be borne. Character is polarized between the passivity of the dupes and life deniers and the comic vitality of the pleasure seekers and the opportunists. The favored characters are escaping the moral inertia of the self righteous in a film that finds comedy and beauty in all facets of human life.
His close-ups on the faces of his largely non-professional cast exemplify Pasolini's obsession with the poor – as usual. Their physiognomy is both often quite repellent yet oddly fascinating. And here the true problem of this and most other Pasolini movies comes to the fore: Most of his performers cannot act and so fail to bring many of his themes fully to life.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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