01
The Decameron
Why this pick
Pasolini’s equally earthy, episodic literary adaptation shares the comic sexuality, medieval pageantry, rough-edged bodies, and gleefully profane challenge to respectable authority.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1972 1h 51m ITA
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
The Canterbury Tales
ComedyDrama
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved The Canterbury Tales, try these.
01
02
Arabian Nights
Why this pick
The final film in Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” expands the tale-within-tale playfulness into a sensual, colourful world of wandering lovers, comic cruelty, and folk-story vitality.
03
Tale of Tales
Why this pick
Its linked fairy tales have the same appetite for bodily excess, vulgar humour, grotesquerie, and medieval-style imagination, rendered with richly tactile locations and costumes.
04
Fellini Satyricon
Why this pick
For the attraction to unruly antique worlds: Fellini offers an episodic procession of desire, superstition, spectacle, and grotesque faces with deliberately dreamlike visual invention.
05
Marketa Lazarová
Why this pick
A far more severe medieval vision, but its mud, violence, pagan ritual, and fragmented storytelling give history the same immediate, physical strangeness rather than polished nostalgia.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
Set in England in the Middle Ages, stories of peasants, noblemen, clergy and demons are interwoven with brief scenes from Chaucer's home life and experiences implied to be the basis for the Canterbury Tales. Each episode does not take the form of a story told by different pilgrim, as is the case in Chaucer's stories, but simply appear in sequence, seemingly without regard for the way that the tales relate to one another in the original text. All the stories are linked to the arrival of a group of pilgrims at Canterbury, among whom is the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, played by Pasolini himself.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Franco Citti
Devil
Dan Thomas
Nicholas
Hugh Griffith
Sir January
Vernon Dobtcheff
Franklin
Robin Askwith
Rufus
Ninetto Davoli
Perkin
Tom Baker
Jenkin
Laura Betti
The Wife from Bath