Such a frustrating disappointment

Good concept, poorly executed.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Best movie ever!

Whenever I watch a Pasolini movie, I am invariably caught by sorrowful spasms at several very obvious technical flaws:1) Why is dubbing used so poorly? Why is the speech so often out of sync? Why, oh why! (Note that until very recent times many Italian flicks suffered from this. I personally believe this is one of the many reasons why Italian cinema, with a few exceptions, has had such a poor diffusion abroad. Movies are made so much more palatable by something as relatively simple as good lip syncing).2) Acting is mostly very poor. I am not a fan of the actors used by Pasolini. I know very well that he uses non professional actors for a reason, that is to draw more genuine emotions from them, to impress the public with fresh, interesting faces, etc. But I think that, while these effects are only partially achieved, the acting is, simply put, horribly directed. There are other instances of movie makers working with non professional actors, and it is not always bad. But with Pasolini it mostly is. In this movie (as in others) acting looks so unnatural, see e.g. Ninetto Davoli in the first episode. Of course this is magnified by what I said at point 1.3) Editing is another problem. Cuts are of uncanny lengths leaving too much silence after some character has spoken, or no silence at all. The pacing of sequences, while resulting in a certain naïveté of the narration (something that I think was intended), is mostly erratic and inconsistent. 4) Close-up abuse! When you have cast weak actors/actresses with uninteresting faces that are very poorly dubbed, the worst you can do is punctuating your movie with close-ups! And this is exactly what happens in Il Decameron. (See for example the first episode when the two burglars speak in front of the sarcophagus, with the camera shifting between the two's frontal close-ups, an especially uncanny effect).I wonder if all of the above are deliberate choices or it is just that Pasolini is not a good filmmaker in those areas. Or maybe it is just me. And the reason I say so is that I have not found (so far) reviews, especially from Italy, that significantly criticize any of those points. However, if you compare Pasolini with the craftsmanship of Italy's greatest director, Federico Fellini, it should be evident that PPP is very far from FF's technical mastery. I am not talking about their artistry or weltanschauung, just of their technical capabilities. Fellini had wonderful actors, who were well dubbed (or self-dubbed) in well edited movies, especially in the early-middle phase of his career. Now, the reason I bring forth Fellini is that Italian critics, while recognizing Fellini as superior, never seem to disprove of the obvious (for me) technical problems that oftentimes make PPP's pictures barely watchable, as if their director's intellectual worthiness, which was testified by his literary accomplishments (Pasolini was a novelist and a poet), were enough by themselves to justify the quality of his cinematic efforts.The above rant on technical faults is made all the more painful by Pasolini's patent inventiveness, coupled with solid narrative and figurative vigor. I still think that Pasolini is a great filmmaker, notwithstanding all I have said. In Il Decameron, he does capture somehow the popular grace of Boccaccio's short stories. The characters, the landscapes, the architecture, the use of dialect, all contribute to the rendering of a stunning fresco of Medieval Italy, a land where religious superstition, joie de vivre and mockery seemed, and still seem, to be all one.When you think of how beautiful and gracious the canvas outline comes out, then you can't help cursing the blotches caused by the violent, seemingly uneducated brush strokes of the maestro. And going back to the Italian critics, I really think they got it all wrong in not criticizing Pasolini's style during his career as a director, because all the praise he received from them did not stimulate him to reconsider his technique, so his entire production came out regrettably flawed.

The tragedy is that this piece of rubbish was part of my curriculum while I was studying cinema. So imagine how I was forced to watch it in complete. Believe me going through hell is much much easier. Our professor told us that this is some film ???, but he never thought that we'd disagree or assume the apposite. I don't think that there is any gods on earth, we're only humans, so all the filmmakers, therefore they CAN make mistakes, bad movies.. Or very bad too. The main problem wasn't that art, by all means, is susceptible to endless points of view, but that a lot of people just don't get it, that every single human got his own genuine taste, his own opinion, hence what I suppose it the greatest movie ever made, can also be your worst one ever, and how that is right both ways, but how many people can understand this correctly?. So my professor believes in this movie, and simply I don't. However, the only way to evaluate this "thing" is by measuring it by its original intent to show us different kinds of old folk stories or whatever to catch on this society's mentality, imagination, and nature. To tell you the truth, Mr. Pier Paolo Pasolini as the scriptwriter and the director made it too unbearable to watch in the first place. The movie is so UGLY. I can't stand this, so how about analyzing it, then discovering the potential beauty in it !! It's beyond your mind hideousness, and strangely not for the sake of the movie's case or anything, it's for the sake of the unstable vision of Pasolini. His work is so primitive to underdeveloped extent. The deadly cinematic technique, the effective sense of silliness, and the incredible horribleness made everything obnoxious. Look at the atrocious acting, the unfruitful cinematography, the awfully poor sets, .. OH MY GOD I've got the nausea already. It can terminate your objectivity violently as watching this movie is one true pain like taking the wisdom tooth off by a blind doctor. There are dreadful nightmares which could be more merciful than this. So originally, how to continue THAT just to review it fairly ? Actually, you don't. As this very movie doesn't treat you fair at all. There is really memorable scene in here where some boys are peeing into the eye of the camera (!) I'm trying to connect some things like that with Pasolini's end as murdered.

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

Film lovers know "Andrei Rublov," that Russian film about an icon painter. The beauty of the film comes in part because the filmmaker is on the same quest as his character, and that quest has as its core the discovery of beauty. The interesting thing about movies is that they create and sustain a fantasy world that lives beyond any one movie and into which we assume each movie is born. That world has its own type of beauty, one born of color and glamor and poise.Paosolini does the same thing as Tarkovsky, but where Tarkovsky dealt with cosmic beauty and recognition, this artist has simpler goals: to engage with flesh, to flow with the simple streams of ignoble daily motion, and to discover beauty in that plain world.Oh, what a terrific cinematic place to visit! This is a far from that collection of movie metaphors and beauty as we can go. There is no movie acting here. There is no external beauty. There is no recourse to familiar characters or representation. As usual, he draws his source material from matter that is not only before cinema, but before any popular writing.And he works with that material outside any movie tricks. Well, he still has that Italian tendency to believe that the world is populated by characters and not situations or any sort of fateful flow. Just people who do things. Lots of little things, usually associated with pleasure.So if you are building a world of cinematic imagination you need to have this as one of your corners. That's silly, every one of us is building a cinematic imagination — we cannot avoid it. What I mean to say is that if you are building an imagination, some of which you understand and can use, some of which you actually want and can enjoy without being sucked into reflex...If you want to just relate to people as people and test how easy it is to find grace in the strangest of faces, then this is your movie voyage for the night.One rather shocking thing is how the nudity works. In "ordinary" film, we thing nothing of seeing two people humping and moaning, nude pelvises grinding is the most hungry of ways. But we gasp when some genital is shown. Here, the exact reverse is found: no shyness about the obvious existence of genitals, an erection even. A sleeping girl with her hand in her lover's crotch. DIsplayed as if it were in the same cinematic territory as the faces he finds.But when these characters lay on each other for sex, we have the most prurient of actor's postures. I think this was done simply to avoid an automatic sweep into ordinary film ways. It has that effect anyway.I don't know anyone that chooses more interesting faces. Distinctly Southern European, odd atypical faces.And finally, there is the bit of his own story inserted, the artist in the church. Creating scenarios of rich life. In the movie, the most amazing scenes are those that have little or nothing to do with the story. There's a "death" tableau that could be the richest single shot I have ever seen, anywhere.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.