If this didn't inspire Terry Gilliam and his approach to his first sole feature film, Jabberwocky five years later, I would be surprised. There's something about the loose production, handheld cameras, and exaggerated lenses and costumes that feels like a precursor to Gilliam's first solo foray into live action filmmaking. After my muted reaction to The Decameron, I was expecting to find the rest of Pasolini's Trilogy of Life to miss the mark as well (especially since the first feature is generally considered the best of the three, it seems), but I was surprisingly amused at a higher layer and more consistently with The Canterbury Tales. I had a pretty good time.
Geoffrey Chaucer (Pasolini) arrives at an inn with fellow pilgrims towards Canterbury and proposes that they entertain each other on the long journey with tales. It's the barest of frameworks brought from the original source material since we never see who's telling what tale (apparently there was more footage that Pasolini cut out that might have addressed this), and the tales begin with The Merchant's Tale with the titular merchant Sir January (Hugh Griffith) deciding to marry May (Josephine Chaplin) who does so because of January's wealth while she continues having an affair with another man. Two spiritual creatures decide to play a game and have January lose his sight for a time, increasing January's sense of jealousy and then giving the sight back while May is in a tree above him with her lover.
I think that the opening tale exemplifies why I gravitate towards this film much more than The Decameron. It's simply more fun to watch. It's less concerned with shock (which simply never interests me). It's more playful. It's less monomaniacally concerned with sex (while still including it as a factor). It's also just generally more entertaining. There are seven more tales that I'm not going to summarize, but I think my favorite would end up being The Miller's Tale about a young man who is enamored of the wife to his next-door neighbor, the carpenter. The young man concocts an elaborate ruse around an impending flood that they can only avoid by hanging large bathtubs from the ceiling, ready to cut them loose when the water gets high enough, an effort to get the carpenter in an isolated place so that the young man and the carpenter's wife can run off to bed to be with each other. There's also some extra stuff around another young man who wants to sleep with the carpenter's wife, some scatological humor, and a red-hot poker.
There's an innocence and sense of fun to all of these tales that gets nicely counterbalanced by some heavier material around death, especially as the film enters its final tellings. The final tale is about three brothers who, after threatening an old man, find a treasure trove of gold under a tree and the effort to kill each other to keep more of the money for each other. This is still told in a surprisingly light manner (the sort of tone that Gilliam would follow up on a few years later), and it continues to be nicely entertaining.
I don't see much thematically running through everything, but it's a series of lightly entertaining tales (I think my only exception would be the start of the previously described tale that relies more on shock than anything else) that move along nicely, give a few laughs along the way, and move on without overstaying their welcomes. The one part that probably edges closest to disgusting while also leaving me in guffaws is in The Summoner's Tale where we discover where the devil hides bad clergymen, and it's where the sun don't shine. It's also nice to see Pasolini regulars like Ninetto Davoli playing a Chaplinesque character in The Cook's Tale and Franco Citti playing the devil in The Friar's Tale.
It's not deeply insightful or deeply moving, but Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales is an amusing look at a recreation of Medieval England from a technically accomplished filmmaker kind of slumming it a bit by just telling bawdy stories. You can still see his concerns around class translated from his normal Italian milieu to the English (Sir January essentially buys his wife, as an example), but they're very much on the backburner, far from the forefront of the events. There is definitely also something there about sexual mores that he was probably trying to use as an attack on contemporary sexual mores in Italy (the addition of the burning of the homosexual in The Friar's Tale makes that unescapable), but, again, aside from that addition, it's mostly pushed aside in favor of bawdiness (rather than shock like in The Decameron).
It's light. It's fun. It's colorful. I had a good time with it.
Geoffrey Chaucer (Pasolini) arrives at an inn with fellow pilgrims towards Canterbury and proposes that they entertain each other on the long journey with tales. It's the barest of frameworks brought from the original source material since we never see who's telling what tale (apparently there was more footage that Pasolini cut out that might have addressed this), and the tales begin with The Merchant's Tale with the titular merchant Sir January (Hugh Griffith) deciding to marry May (Josephine Chaplin) who does so because of January's wealth while she continues having an affair with another man. Two spiritual creatures decide to play a game and have January lose his sight for a time, increasing January's sense of jealousy and then giving the sight back while May is in a tree above him with her lover.
I think that the opening tale exemplifies why I gravitate towards this film much more than The Decameron. It's simply more fun to watch. It's less concerned with shock (which simply never interests me). It's more playful. It's less monomaniacally concerned with sex (while still including it as a factor). It's also just generally more entertaining. There are seven more tales that I'm not going to summarize, but I think my favorite would end up being The Miller's Tale about a young man who is enamored of the wife to his next-door neighbor, the carpenter. The young man concocts an elaborate ruse around an impending flood that they can only avoid by hanging large bathtubs from the ceiling, ready to cut them loose when the water gets high enough, an effort to get the carpenter in an isolated place so that the young man and the carpenter's wife can run off to bed to be with each other. There's also some extra stuff around another young man who wants to sleep with the carpenter's wife, some scatological humor, and a red-hot poker.
There's an innocence and sense of fun to all of these tales that gets nicely counterbalanced by some heavier material around death, especially as the film enters its final tellings. The final tale is about three brothers who, after threatening an old man, find a treasure trove of gold under a tree and the effort to kill each other to keep more of the money for each other. This is still told in a surprisingly light manner (the sort of tone that Gilliam would follow up on a few years later), and it continues to be nicely entertaining.
I don't see much thematically running through everything, but it's a series of lightly entertaining tales (I think my only exception would be the start of the previously described tale that relies more on shock than anything else) that move along nicely, give a few laughs along the way, and move on without overstaying their welcomes. The one part that probably edges closest to disgusting while also leaving me in guffaws is in The Summoner's Tale where we discover where the devil hides bad clergymen, and it's where the sun don't shine. It's also nice to see Pasolini regulars like Ninetto Davoli playing a Chaplinesque character in The Cook's Tale and Franco Citti playing the devil in The Friar's Tale.
It's not deeply insightful or deeply moving, but Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales is an amusing look at a recreation of Medieval England from a technically accomplished filmmaker kind of slumming it a bit by just telling bawdy stories. You can still see his concerns around class translated from his normal Italian milieu to the English (Sir January essentially buys his wife, as an example), but they're very much on the backburner, far from the forefront of the events. There is definitely also something there about sexual mores that he was probably trying to use as an attack on contemporary sexual mores in Italy (the addition of the burning of the homosexual in The Friar's Tale makes that unescapable), but, again, aside from that addition, it's mostly pushed aside in favor of bawdiness (rather than shock like in The Decameron).
It's light. It's fun. It's colorful. I had a good time with it.