Word: decameron
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...didn't see anything any more and started hitting him and hitting him as hard as I could." Whether or not the story is this simplistic, the assassination was as disgusting, as degrading, as gross and pornographic as the worst scene in one of Pasolini's recent movies. (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Salo: or The Last Days of Sodom). This massacre had no cause, served no purpose...
THERE'S AN OLD TRICK in English literature; I don't know if it has a name, but generally it's an overused gimmick that's been done well a couple of times. Boccacio first used this trick in the Decameron, upon which Chaucer modeled Canterbury Tales. The idea is to get some people together in a place where they will reveal themselves through some telling story or action. Usually a new perspective breathes life into this old hack's trick. But in Philadelphia, Anyone? the perspective seems almost as old as its technique...
...effect is dazzling, reminiscent of the British film Dead of Night (1946) that resolved itself as one dream enveloped by another. Each episode of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is consistently amusing and often hilariously shrewd. The film is a miniature Decameron woven together by a shot-repeated several times-of the six characters walking briskly along a country road. They are pilgrims in a bucolic purgatory, condemned by Bunuel for their militant mediocrity...
...DECAMERON Pier Paolo Pasolini, an avowed Marxist who makes pallid films of Christianity (The Gospel According to St. Matthew; Theorem), has taken on more than he can eschew. Using ten of Boccaccio's tales, Pasolini twits the church by showing lascivious nuns, self-mocking ghosts, corrupt priests and finally the trials of the painter Giotto, played by Pasolini himself. Giotto was a cornerstone of Renaissance painting; Pasolini plays him as an interior decorator. Boccaccio was famous for his ribaldry; Pasolini is notorious for his vapidity. To adapt the Decameron successfully, a film maker must come to his senses...
...trouble, though, was that Shakespeare, drawing on an episode in Boccaccio's Decameron. foisted on us a plot that is at once preposterous and poorly constructed. To which we must add that his heroine, Helena, lacks motivation, and his supposed hero. Bertram, lacks all semblance of virtue...