Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29445 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-05-07
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: Italian
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 107 minutes

DVD Description
DVD Special Features
Italian language, English subtitles
1.66:1

Synopsis
Octet of ribald tales from Boccaccio's "Decameron" with Pasolini as Giotto providing the link between the tales. First in Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life," which also includes "The Arabian Nights" and "The Canterbury Tales." Originally rated X by the Motion Picture Association of America.

From the Back Cover
The first of Pasolini’s colourful, entertaining and highly erotic Trilogy of Life films based on famous story cycles (to be followed by The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights), The Decameron contains ten stories based on the fourteenth century works of Giovanni Boccaccio.

Capturing the bawdy, earthy spirit of the original, the film romps through its tales of sex and death – of lusty nuns and priests, cuckolded husbands, murdered lovers and grave-robbers, with five of the stories linked by an artist, ‘Giotto’s pupil’, played by Pasolini himself.

Customer Reviews

So much beauty in so much dirt
On a sunny day in Naples, a rich young man comes to the market to buy horses. He is tricked by a woman into believing he is her brother and he ends in the tank of the toilet, robbed and soiled. But escaping that trap he finds himself in the street and the scene turns fantastic. The women from their windows tell him to disappear and the men in the street tell him just the same. So there he runs away dressed in his underwear soaked in and perfumed with human feces. His descent to hell in a way. He hides from some nocturnal men in a barrel in some underground cellar but not for long. The men are thieves and they hire him on a mission and there the real film really starts. You will have to go and see it if you want to get the details. Who will die and who will survive, that is THE question in this cruel world. In this film you have to go down into all kinds of holes, tombs, caves, cellars. Pasolini has rewritten Boccaccio with the pen of Dante and he settles accounts with the church first of all, that Italian church that is rich though doing nothing, by doing nothing and exploiting the whole society. And society is then engaged in a simple game, that of recuperating all they can from that church, be it a benediction, be it an absolution, be it a rite of some sort but also some of the stolen money they carry in their clerical purses. So Pasolini makes his characters steal from the dead bishop, and thus steal from his stealing surviving mates. Then they steal from the people in the street, purse pickers they are. They steal some good cheer, comfort, and pleasure from the hypocritical nuns, at least as long as youth grants the young man with enough potency and power and hardness to be able to satisfy the hunger of twenty nuns. They make false confessions not to save their souls but to look good in society when they die and save some trouble to their friends. And of course they steal as much pleasure as they can and absolutely disregard the idea that it may be a sin. Never mind the sin provided we have the pleasure. And this Italy is the Italy of all crimes, of all murders and embezzlements. And of course they all manage to get through but Hell is the destination of them all and the vision of that Hell is superb and in the tradition of its representations in the churches of the end of the 15th century, after the big plague, the Black Death. And yet poetry haunts this film in the very excess it demonstrates. Excess in the language, intonations that you have to enjoy in Italian of course, but also excess in the body language, especially, but not only, facial language. These Italians speak with their full bodies, particularly their hands and their faces. Excess in desire and passion, violence and hypocrisy. Even the morbidity of some scenes becomes artistic in its extreme sadness. And his vision of Hell is superb. Scatology transformed into a great art and that's just the point. The end of the film is the final vision of the fresco some master painter was painting in a church. That painter is the one who had the vision of hell but he transformed it into a civil and elegant scene full of majesty and nobility. He can regret the vision that was so beautiful but he could not render it on the wall of the church. A beautiful film though maybe slightly nostalgic and restrained, which means not entirely free-wheeling along the easy road Pasolini would have liked to be able to take but did not take entirely or in full light.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Passolini explores the narrative tradition
'The Decameron' is one Pasolini's trilogy of films ('Arabian Nights' and 'Canterbury Tales' are the others) exploring the role of the storyteller and the translation of this timeless vocal tradition into a cinematic one. The cinema has typically taken on board the format of the novel - it presents one central story, with maybe a couple of subplots, seen from the point of view of one of the protagonists or of a neutral onlooker. The storytelling tradition, however, while it might include epics like the 'Iliad', generally follows shorter stories, and often relates these to a specific moral.

Pasolini provides a cavalcade of tales exploring life and death, lust and sex, the materialism of the peasant world, the carnality of life. If there is a moral it is that sex and lust are blessings. Here, sex is presented as a political act - we all have ultimate political control over our own bodies; and here Pasolini explores the nature of belief, contrasting the real, physical, material world of sex and abandonment with the censorship and authoritarianism of religion. Pasolini was fascinated by the interaction of the Marxist and Catholic traditions within Italy ... and with the world of the traditional peasant before they became anachronisms with the growth of cities and the development of an industrialised economy.

'The Decameron' is set in a medieval world which embodies the traditional values of rough peasant sex, duplicity, and conflict with the moral certainties of the Church. We have nuns forsaking their vows of chastity, cuckolded husbands, a celebration of bodily functions. We have comedy, drama, music. It's lewd, it's bawdy, and there are bodies aplenty.

Here we have life, bounded by rules, but rules which are often pure hypocrisy. Pasolini prefers the vulgarity of peasant life and its flexible violation of rules - rules of law, rules of religion, rules of social structure and hierarchy. Guilt is created by the Church ... but can be exorcised by the simple expedient of confession. Surely the peasants are more honest in their human breaking of rules ... particularly sexual ones? He rejoices in their superstition, their ignorance, their selfishness and materialism.

It's a slow paced but exuberant celebration of life in the raw. The visual style is sumptuous in places, aping the colours of medieval art. Pasolini offers characters in his photography - the beautiful and the ugly people, using amateur actors to emphasise the lack of sophistication of the peasant world. His exploration of the nature of storytelling produces overlapping tableau after tableau, short tales which cut straight into the next and challenge the conventional structure of cinema.

It's engaging, it's entertaining, and it will make you laugh.

Part 1 of the Trilogy of Life.
Nice to see The Decameron reissued, as well as parts two and three of the 'Trilogy of Life'- The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Knights. Though be warned, not everything that Pasolini made was genius- his novels a dilution of Camus and Genet and films like Hawks & Sparrows do nothing for me.

The Decameron is far from his best works- Mamma Roma, Accatone, La Ricotta, The Gospel According to St Matthew, Theorum and Salo- but is worth seeing for a myriad of reasons (not just for those studying Boccaccio). Pasolini was moving towards this kind of film with St Matthew and Medea, the meticulous recreation of the past being a prime factor which will leave you hurtling towards The Golden Bough or The Uses of Enchantment.

In this trilogy Pasolini fused his ever-mutating philosophy with three classic works- here we get excerpts from the vast text- in a similar way that Kieslowki's final work, Heaven, uses aspects of The Divine Comedy. Pasolini is making things more obvious with the 'storyteller' aspect prevalent in this work- this would be continued to the deranged courtesan of Salo; while Pasolini himself makes an appearance as Giotto- as he would appear as Chaucer in The Canterbury Tale. This further confounds the associations made between Pasolini's life and art (JG Ballard defined Pasolini as "sociopath disguised as Saint" in The User's Guide to the Millennium).

The Decameron is an impressive film, though some knowledge of the original text (which I didn't have) would be helpful- to see where Boccaccio ends and Pasolini begins. As ever the composition and design is wonderful- as the costumes- this is partly down to Dante Ferretti (now a Scorsese regular like Michael Ballhaus) and the late Danilo Donati (costume designer and sometime writer/director). Ennio Morricone also contributes some music, as Tonino del Colli offers up fantastic photography.

The Trilogy of Life is well worth watching, not as gruelling or Gramscian as films like Pigsty, Salo & Theorum; though ultimately Pasolini would reject this direction- as he had the early works (Mamma Roma, Accatone) and move to his last broadcast, Salo (another story...).