Word: decameron
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...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...
Italian Shoes. The projector again whirls, and the women settle back behind their desks to watch Decameron 69. They see two figures squirming on a bed; he removes her sweater, she fondles his fly. "Mark that," Mrs. Shriver shouts to the technician; the scene will be deleted. "Look at his testicles showing there," she calls later. "Mark that." As the film grinds on, the women exchange comments. "I can't tell which country this is because there's no dialogue," complains Mrs. Shriver. "They look like Italian shoes," says Mrs. Shecter, 55, wife of a Baltimore advertising executive...
Melted Ears. Decameron (Ron) Grant, 36, is a playwright with the genius of an O'Neill and the sexual insatiability of a Sukarno. He is strictly a four-letter man, and he has manhood problems and a domineering mistress-an older woman who with her husband nurtured the young playwright's talents in his more golden days. To rediscover himself, Grant heads for the Caribbean to go skindiving. In addition to a shark or two, he spears beautiful Lucky Videndi, and as he tries to work out a modus vivendi with her, he alternates between ocean...