The Canterbury Tales (film)

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I racconti di Canterbury is a 1972 Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and is based on The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is the second movie of the Trilogy of Life by Pasolini.

Pasolini's adaptation of Chaucer is, in many ways, remarkably faithful; certainly The Miller's Tale has never been more richly rendered. Yet in other aspects, Pasolini appears more interested in employing The Canterbury Tales as a vehicle for his own filmic sense of the polymorphously perverse.

Notably, Pasolini makes creative use of the fragment, The Cook's Tale, featuring Ninetto Davoli as "Perkyn" in a role clearly inspired by Charles Chaplin. Pasolini translates and makes use of, almost literally, all 58 lines in the most purely comedic moment of the film.

One tale that appears in Pasolini's film but not in Chaucer's work concerns two men caught in an inn bedroom committing what was then considered an unnatural act: one man is buggering the other. Soldiers burst in--this is several centuries before the concept of a police force had caught on--and arrest the two men. The one on top, naturally, is able to bribe the guards to let him go.The "bottom" is less fortunate: he is tried and convicted of sodomy. In the next scene, he is burned alive inside an iron cage--"roasted on a griddle" in the words of one spectator--while vendors circulate among the spectators selling beer and various baked and roasted foods. This story, which may be based on Pasolini's own experience of life as a gay man in a homophobic society, as well as on his own Marxist beliefs, is isomorphic to modern prison stories, wherein a young newly-arrived prisoner is raped by older, stronger prisoners who insist that they are not gay but merely opportunistic (outside, they rape women; inside, they rape men); it is their victim who is really gay.

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Movies by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Accattone \| Mamma Roma \| La ricotta (RoGoPaG) \| The Gospel According to St. Matthew \| Love Meetings \| The Hawks and the Sparrows \| The Witches \| Oedipus Rex \| Theorem \| Love and Anger \| Pigpen \| Medea \| The Decameron \| The Canterbury Tales \| Il fiore delle mille e una notte \| Salò