I recently rented "Canterbury Tales" because I started reading the Chaucer book and also because I liked Pasolini´s final film "Salo". However, I was very much disappointed with the results. To be sure, the film begins strongly as the first tale presented (about a young woman cheating on her elderly, temporarily blind husband) has an enjoyable sense of playfulness and brilliant camera work (especially the ambiguous, naturalistic shots of sloppy facial expressions, which are usually always a strong point for Pasolini). Even the 2 tales that followed had their merits. The story of the tax collectors played like an interesting poetic riddle and the tale of the Charlie Chaplin style "reveler" was fun in how it combined Chaplinesque innocence with things like gambling and group sex. However, after this, my appreciation of the film soon went down as the stories that followed lacked virtually anything that could be called likable. It was mostly just wooden, superficial characters hysterically shouting at each other so cartoonishly that even a seven year old would complain about bad acting while watching it and lots of cheap bodily function jokes that were done better hundreds of times elsewhere. And it also has plenty of completely unerotic sex scenes that belong in 70s Italian gross out soft porn rather than in any movie that´s meant to be taken seriously. And the infamous hell scene at the end feels like bad children´s television (e.g. "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians") with its cheap looking paper costumes and sloppy claymation. While scholars or people who lived in Italy during the 60s and 70s could probably spot intellectual criticisms of society´s hypocrisy in the movie, they really do not save it much - especially not from completely butchering the intelligence, humanity and depth of Chaucer´s original work. In any case, "Canterbury Tales" shows that no matter how artistic you make your visuals, if your movie lacks plot and characterization, they will be badly missed.
Review of The Canterbury Tales
