Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte)
|  The third and final film in his “Trilogy of Life,” Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte), which is adapted from some of the more erotic tales from the Arabic story collection One Thousand and One Nights, differs markedly from the previous two films in the series, The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972), each of which was also adapted from a canonical story collection. In one sense, Arabian Nights merges the themes and tones of those two films, maintaining some of the bawdy humor and joyful sexual liberty of The Decameron while also infusing some of the darker, more violent overtones of The Canterbury Tales (the playfulness of the film’s sexuality is offset with characters being crucified, castrated, and dismembered). Arabian Nights also lacks a central artist figure—the painter Giotto’s disciple in The Decameron and author Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, both played by Pasolini himself—who in some way unifies the various stories in the film.While all three films takes place in a premodern past tense, a crucial temporal setting that grounds Pasolini’s themes about sexuality and the human body uncorrupted by capitalism and commodification, the first two films were set in the more familiar environs of medieval Italy and England. Arabian Nights, on the other hand, is set in the Middle East, which Pasolini depicts via actual locations in Iran, Africa, Yemen, and Nepal. The film’s striking location work is certainly one of its chief appeals; the imagery if often genuinely sublime, although Pasolini still infuses the lush, painterly beauty with his roughshod, neorealist handheld camerawork. However, for some critics the film’s setting is also one of the its primary political and moral stumbling blocks, as Pasolini perhaps unwittingly does the very thing he professes to despise, as his European gaze “exoticizes” the Orient (which was precisely the role played by the English language edition of One Thousand and One Nights in the 18th century), turning it into an object to be consumed, rather than a culture with history and heritage (Pasolini is largely disinterested in actual history, anyway). The fact that the film takes place in the Islamic world also vacates Arabian Nights of the previous films’ withering mockery of the Catholic Church and its dogma. Given the film’s setting, he could have easily turned his critical eye to Islam, but instead made a film that is largely devoid of religion (a Western character is referred to as a “Christian,” but that refers more to his being from the West, rather his religious affiliation). With the exception of two holy men who tell the story of how they left behind wealth and privilege for an ascetic life, no major characters are depicted as being religious at all, much less devout, and, more importantly, there are no religious authority figures to be found. Thus, Arabian Nights is arguably a secular film, its sexual themes unhindered by any form of repression or stricture from a higher authority (not surprisingly, then, the film poses homosexuality as simply one part of the human sexual spectrum, rather than depicting it as a source of social shame, blackmail, and even death, as in the previous two films). The framing story in Arabian Nights involves a slave girl named Zumurrud (Ines Pellegrini) who is sold, at her insistence, to Nur Ed Din (Franco Merli), a sexually inexperienced young waif with no money. Zumurrud sexually initiates Nur Ed Din and they ostensibly fall in love, only to be separated when Zumurrud is kidnapped by a thief, the culmination of a premonition Zumurrud had that Nur Ed Din explicitly ignores. While Nur Ed Din spends the rest of the film trying to reclaim her, Zumurrud makes her own way by escaping her captivity and, dressed as a man, finds herself in a fabulous desert city where she is crowned king. Throughout these adventures various characters that Nur Ed Din and Zumurrud meet tell stories (and some of them tell stories within stories, a feature of the original text), most of which are built around the tensions between faithfulness and betrayal. Chief among these is the lengthy story of Aziz (Ninetto Davoli), a young man who leaves his fiancée Aziza (Tessa Bouché) on their wedding day because he instantly falls in love with a mysterious woman named Budur (Luigina Rocchi). Nevertheless, Aziza assists Aziz in his relationship with Budur by helping him decode her signs and language, but it is ultimately to no avail as Aziz—like virtually all men in the film—is inherently callow and incapable of fidelity. Another of the film’s more memorable stories involves Prince Shahzmah (Alberto Argentino), who falls in love with a young woman who is being held captive by a demon (Franco Citti, who played the deplorable Ciappelletto in The Decameron and Satan himself in The Canterbury Tales). Interestingly, Arabian Nights is the most female-centric of the three films in “The Trilogy of Life,” as men tend to be depicted as weak, unfaithful, and even downright stupid, while the female characters are often resourceful, strong, and dedicated. This results in some of the most memorable on-screen women in Pasolini’s cinema, but it also leads him to overemphasize male fallibility, which comes at the expense of narrative coherence. Most problematic in this regard is Franco Merli’s Nur Ed Din, who is intended to be one of the film’s central points of identification, but is played as so devoid of brain cells that he quickly turns into an annoying cipher, a dim-witted fool who becomes more and more grating as the film goes on. Merli, a nonprofessional actor who Pasolini discovered working at a gas station, makes his character’s numerous bad decisions, selfish actions, and inexcusable foibles all the more annoying with his off-kilter and extremely amateurish performance. As an example of male unfaithfulness he is without peer, as he spends the film searching for Zumurrud, his supposed fated true love, but gets constantly sidetracked in various sexual adventures that he submits to without so much as a whimper of protest. Thus, by the time he is reunited with Zumurrud (who he believes to be a man), we wish that she would send him to the gallows rather than take him to bed. Alas, that is not Pasolini’s intent, and while Arabian Nights has its share of impressive vistas and narrative trickery, its fundamental emotional disconnect renders it inert—a beautiful bit of exotic fantasy that quickly dissipates.
Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © The Criterion Collection and United Artists/MGM | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Arabian Nights is available exclusively as part of the three-disc “Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life” box set (SRP $79.95), which also includes The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972). The box set is also available on DVD.Overall Rating: 
(2)
