The Decameron (1971)

the audience applauded

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Based on a selection of stories from Giovanni Boccaccio's bawdy classic "The Decameron", Pasolini's successful and brilliant film works as a celebration of life, love, and sexuality. It's filled with moments of playfulness, joy, and laugh out loud humor. It also contains a fair share of somewhat tragic and dark elements-but, in the end, the film left with a great smile on my face.As a person who loves to laugh, I can assure you that "The Decameron" fulfilled my love many times throughout. It's hilarious- containing a sense of humor that ranges from crude to clever and from dark to light. It's one of the funniest films I've seen in a while.However, the film should also come with a warning, due to it containing some highly explicit sexual content. Practically every story told is sexual in nature, and some of them can be downright offensive depending on your beliefs. Of course, I was not at all offended by the sexual content in this film-even if I was a little shocked every now and then. But with that brief shock quickly came the relief of laughter, so I do not at all mind!"The Decameron" is wildly entertaining and funny-see it as soon as possible!

Plenty of positive reviews on this site. The Decameron is great - the 14th-century book I mean. What I've read of it anyway, the writing is a mix of Saki and Tales of the Unexpected and holds up very well, in particular the tale about the Christian who hopes to convert his Jewish friend, who decides to go to Rome to observe the clergy to see what all the fuss is about, with unexpected results.The film can't cover something like 100 tales in the book, but the director seems to handpick the bawdy ones for our (or his) delight. But the bawdiness is unerotic, as if to highlight how comical and debasing such lusty antics. And the 'punchline' - so excellent in the story I mentioned above (which doesn't feature) - is often so weak as to be unnoticeable. You wait for something more to happen, only to find, oh, it's a new story. Okay, that was it was it? What's more, there isn't the comic touch to milk some of the set-ups properly. Frankly, some of the Carry On films do this stuff far better. It's a shame they never set a Carry On film in the medieval era actually. On the plus side, the wonderful scenery stays with you, and it is good to see women who aren't the usual Hollywood example, it does change the mindset regarding the opposite sex a bit.This is a rare example where the book (in particular the Penguin translation) is easier to dip into.

Pier Paolo Pasolini has with the Decameron what is supposedly one of his "happiest" movies. This is not to say the film is always cheery- matter of fact a couple of the stories deep down are pretty dark and sad and cursed thanks to the repression of religion and mortal sins- but Pasolini's comedy here is sharp and his wit comes out in the obscene or in the random. It's a little like Bunuel only with a more earthy sensibility with the locations and slightly less surreal situations; it doesn't mean that Pasolini is any less ambitious with treating the foibles and stringent ways of the Catholic Church.The Decameron's only big liability, in my estimation, is that it could be easy to get lost in the structure Pasolini sets up; it's nine stories, ranging from a Sicillian being swindled after finding out he's a brother to a sister of royalty until he's covered in feces, to a supposedly deaf-mute boy who becomes the sex toy for a bunch of sex-starved nuns, to a supposed 'Saint' who fools a priest into thinking he's such with his lackluster confessional, to a girl being met by her boyfriend on the roof and then being (joyfully) caught by her parents since his family is wealthy. They're all interesting stories, more often than not, with even a really short piece like the priest attempting to seduce his friend's wife providing something amusing or eye-catching visually.But, again, all of these stories go from one into the next without much warning, and one may wonder when the next story really begins or if it's a continuation of the last. As it turns out, like the Phantom of Liberty, it's very stream-of-consciousness and one skewering of morality and sex can bleed easily into the other. And yet some may find this to be a more daring strength than others; certainly it's a very funny movie (if not quite as funny as Pasolini's masterpiece The Hawks and the Sparrows), like with the bit of the guy caught in the tomb, to the frankness of the parents asking the boy to marry their daughter on the rooftop - even just the strange feeling one gets watching the painter (played by, I think, Pasolini himself) in the act of creating an unusual but unique work on a church wall.The greatest thing of all, for fans of the subversive, is that nothing is out of bounds for Pasolini, via his source material of the Boccaccio book, and he never is one to ever shy away from sex. That's also another asset this time around- unlike Arabian Nights we get some actually erotic bits thrown in the midst, if unintentionally, and on occasion (i.e. the shot following Lorenzo as he runs by the fence) the director conjures something powerful amidst the medieval/surreal/neo-realist pastiche. 8.5/10

This movie is the first of the Pasolini's "Trilogia della Vita" (trilogy of life) movies. The other two movies are "Il fiore delle mille e una notte" e " "I racconti di Canterbury". With this films Pasolini's want to describe essentially the joy of life, in all shapes, in difficult moments too. He based this movies on three middle-age novels in which there's a main novel that contain other novels. "Decamerone" is a XIV century novel by Giovanni Boccaccio and is the most ancient of the three novel. Teen girls and boys, living in a Tuscany isolated house to escape from the Black Death, tell each other symbolical stories. Some of these stories compose the movie. As the novel was in the past, so the movie was considered a immoral thing in the seventies. The movie had many not-official sequels: erotic B-movies with no relation with the symbolic messages of the first one.Pasolini essentially was a poet and his movies was image poems. Pasolini could only start the "Trilogia della Morte", the trilogy of death, because he was brutally killed during the post-production of "Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma". So Italians lost one of his greatest artists.