The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury)
|  The middle film in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial “Trilogy of Life,” The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury) is also the darkest and least appealing of the three films, which is ironic given than Pasolini ends with himself playing Canterbury author Geoffrey Chaucer writing, “Here end the Canterbury tales, told only for the pleasure of telling them. Amen.” This line is the creation of Pasolini’s, not Chaucer’s, as it appears nowhere in the original 14th-century text. Pasolini may have very well re-told eight of the 24 tales that Chaucer completed for “the pleasure of telling them,” but his cinematic adaptation suggests an angry, masochistic form of pleasure, which shouldn’t be surprising given that he going through a particularly dark period in his life when the film was in production.Unlike the first film in the trilogy, The Decameron (1971), which features mostly stories that hinge on light-hearted bawdiness and sex-related gags, many of the stories in The Canterbury Tales hinge on violence and death; Thanatos seems to trump Eros at every turn. The most revealing story is “The Friar’s Tale,” which occurs early in the film and also represents one of Pasolini’s greatest elaborations on Chaucer’s original writings. While it maintains the basic theme of official corruption, Pasolini invents a plot thread involving two men who are caught in the act of sodomy by a corrupt summoner. While the wealthier of the two is able to buy his way out of the situation, the poorer of the two men is hauled away and burned alive (“roasted on a griddle,” in the film’s parlance) before a large audience of onlookers comprised most of ornately dressed clergy and aristocrats. The graphic nature of the man’s immolation, prefaced by his all-too-convincing screams and panic, looks forward to both the film’s final sequence, in which a friar is escorted to Hell, and Pasolini’s notorious final film, Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), which he made as a direct rebuke to “The Trilogy of Life” after his cinematically realized ideals about uncorrupted, premodern sexuality were pilfered for soft-core knock-offs. Scenes of death also appear in “The Pardoner’s Tale,” in which three students happen upon a treasure and then betray each other, resulting in the death of all three. This story is the most aesthetically impressive in the film, as Pasolini stages the three-way betrayal and subsequent deaths from low angles against the intense orange of the setting sun, turning the action into a compelling shadow play of ironic violence. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” of course, relies on death since the story involves her ill-fated fifth marriage, her four previous husbands having died from too much sexual exertion. Even the film’s brightest and cheeriest character, a Chaplinesque tramp in “The Cook’s Tale,” winds up in a pillory—punishment for his social deviance and vivacity. And, as mentioned, “The Summoner’s Tale,” which concludes the film, depicts a crooked friar who is first seen trying to get money from a dying man and at the end of the story is taken to Hell by an angel, which Pasolini recreates on the black slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily as a campy orgy of forced sodomy, leering devils in garish body paint, and a giant Satan literally defecating friars by the dozen (the culminating moment of the film’s visual obsession with buttocks and anality). At this point it is impossible to tell if Pasolini means for us to take any of this seriously, but what is clear is that the film is driven by an underlying current of anger, resentment, and frustration, which runs in direct counterpoint to Pasolini’s depiction of Chaucer, alone in his study chuckling to himself and smiling as he writes the stories (Pasolini largely discards Chaucer’s framing device of having the pilgrims to Canterbury actively telling their stories and instead jumps to the next level of meta-narrative in portraying Chaucer, having been one of the pilgrims, writing them down from memory). While The Decameron was praised in many quarters for its earthy celebration of the body and uncorrupted sexuality, The Canterbury Tales frequently revels in physical debasement. “The Pardoner’s Tale” begins with the three students in a brothel, engaging in all manner of joyless kinky sex (one is being whipped by a naked prostitute) followed by one of them urinating from the balcony onto people eating at the tables below. In the opening story, “The Merchant’s Tale,” a wealthy man marries a much younger woman and is then struck blind, which allows her to pursue an affair with her lover only to be interrupted by her husband’s returning sight. “The Miller’s Tale” involves two lovers humiliating an amorous suitor by tricking him and farting in his face and ends with the spurned suitor burning one of them in the rear with a red-hot poker. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” hinges on another troubled May-December relationship (albeit one that is gender reversed from “The Merchant’s Tale”), adding to the general sense of discord and anger among the various characters. The one exception is “The Reeve’s Tale,” the film’s one truly bawdy celebration of unbridled lust, which finds two students seducing the wife and daughter of a miller while sleeping in the very room with him. Pasolini tries frequently to lighten the film’s overall grim tone by incorporating a great deal of slapstick comedy, most of which doesn’t work, including the much extended “Cook’s Tale,” which centers on Ninetto Davoli’s Chaplinesque tramp, complete with bowler hat, too-small coat, and cane. Some of Davoli’s facial expressions and physical mannerisms are oddly humorous, but Pasolini’s use of sped-up motion at various points feels nothing less than embarrassingly juvenile and desperate (while Pasolini is a master of incorporating the art of classical painting into his films, he is virtually tone deaf when trying to reflect on cinema itself). Despite winning the Golden Bear at the 1972 Berlin Film Festival, The Canterbury Tales is generally considered the weakest entry in “The Trilogy of Life” and one of Pasolini’s lowliest films. In many ways it stays true to Chaucer’s stories, which feature all manner of lewd behavior, scatological humor, and satire of both the Church and the ruling classes. However, the brash, arguably campy manner in which Pasolini transcribes Chaucer’s medieval bawdiness to the screen, coupled with the film’s various technical faults (particularly the lousy dubbed dialogue, whether in English or Italian), tends to make the film a chore to watch. Pasolini may have told the stories for the pleasure of telling them, but there is not much pleasure in watching them.
Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © The Criterion Collection and United Artists/MGM | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Canterbury Tales 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 Arabian Nights (1974). The box set is also available on DVD.Overall Rating: 
(1.5)
