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Pier Paolo Pasolini as Chaucer, his feet up in a Da Messina study, quill at the ready when inspiration strikes. An Italian eye on England, not Antonioni's swinging mods but medieval reprobates in anecdotes "told only for the pleasure of telling them." Hugh Griffith in full leering-cawing swing points up the Tom Jones element, his sight is taken away only to be restored in time to catch his wife (Josephine Chaplin) in flagrante delicto. Busted sodomites, one can afford to bribe his way out and the other cannot, at the burning the Devil (Franco Citti) hawks fritters to the audience. "Aren't we all out for profit?" Keystone shenanigans for Perkin Reveller, Pasolini gives Ninetto Davoli a wooden bowler and a braying ditty and invents Adam Sandler. (Anderson in The Master has the reverie of the bare female band.) Pious prophecies are nothing but ruses to get into each other's pants, great blasts of flatulence and red-hot pokers follow the promise of a new flood. Frauds, thieves, betrayers and the deaths that await them—no other entry in the director's Trilogy of Life so plainly illustrates the gulf between the ebullience of the source and the bitterness of the treatment. The Wife of Bath (Laura Betti) is a hennish nympho with hand firmly on the crotch of her neighbor (Tom Baker), elsewhere "gentle scholars" and vengeful bed-hopping at the greedy miller's home (cf. Gilliam's Jabberwocky). Funerals segue into weddings, a golden sun silhouettes poisoned wine and duplicitous knives. "What is a treasure worth divided into many parts?" The unforgettable finale is a quick trip from monastery to Bosch inferno, just fuochi d'artifico and Beckett's "world's straining anus" to bring a smile to a storyteller's lips. With Jenny Runacre, Michael Balfour, John Francis Lane, Derek Deadman, and Nicholas Smith.
--- Fernando F. Croce |