Pasolini freely adapts ten or so episodes from Boccaccio's fourteenth century collection of hundred short stories. He interweaves the tales of happy or tragic lovers, naughty nuns and lusty priests, naive husbands and cheating but quick-witted wives, inept grave robbers, and a young gardener who got more than he had bargained for, with his own meditations on art, life, death and love. Pasolini himself plays a painter Giotto who observes the characters that inspire him to paint a fresco on the church's wall.
"Decameron" is the first part of Pasolini's "Trilogy Of Life", which continues with adaptations of two other celebrated works of world fiction; "The Canterbury Tales" (1972) and the "Arabian Nights" aka "A Thousand and One Nights" (1974). All these books have been known as distinguished and revered works of literature that belong to the immortal classics. There are probably so many big volumes have been written about them that it would take more than a thousand and one days and nights to read them. They talk about love, death, the meaning of life, and religion but first and most of all they entertain. At the time they were told and written down, no one would think of them as the future academic references. That's why they are so alive, earthy, coarse, and bold. I have not seen two other Pasolini's films but 'Decameron' captures the original spirit of Boccaccio's tales truthfully and with love, humanity, and perfect sense of the medieval Italy.
The film has a look of a renaissance painting not only Italian Renaissance (Giotto) but Netherlandish Northern Renaissance - Peter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch.
As he often did, Pasolin used in the film the non-professional actors to play the medieval peasants. They had none of the Hollywood glamor or classical features or perfect teeth and smiles but their faces are interesting, original, and real.
Full of rustic comedy and innocence, earthy humor and lust for life "Decameron" is one of the most optimistic, and celebrating life films ever made. Its sexuality is straightforward and honest, moving and not insulting. This film, my first Pasolini made me want to see the rest of the trilogy and the rest of his films.
