One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most beautiful works, and the one substantial part of his “Trilogy of Life” (The Canterbury Tales, 1971, and Arabian Nights, 1972, are the other entries), The Decameron springboards off of Giovanni Boccaccio’s crammed 14th-century text to reflect on the present day, such as the abiding deleterious influence of the Roman Catholic Church where sex is concerned, and the delightful nature of human sexuality about which the Church is so prohibitive and hypocritical. The 1970 film from Italy, West Germany and France, which it condemned upon the film’s release the following year, still stands condemned by the Church. The Church apparently knows when superior art has gotten the better of it. Pasolini’s Decameron took the Special Jury Prize at Berlin.
The occasion for the one hundred tales included in Boccaccio’s masterpiece, you may recall, is the plague, the Black Death, that is afflicting Florence (1348), causing its inhabitants to flee to the country, where, pursued by the plague, the survivors wall themselves in for ten days, regaling one another with storytelling to pass the time. Although he shifts Boccaccio’s focal point to Naples, Pasolini does not dispense with the plague, which, in fact, is implicit throughout, although he has eliminated the frame in which the fearful gather and tell tales. But Pasolini’s plague consists of a thoroughly modern strain in addition to the authority of the Church: capitalism; the exploitation of workers and the lower class by those stationed socially and politically above them. (The skewering of the Church is perfectly in tune with the Boccaccio.) Pasolini’s ribald, comical tapestry gets a grip on things, and its greatness—for this is a great film—especially lies in its intellectually flexible means of aiming at one target through the other. In taking aim at the Church, Pasolini finds the means to take aims at modern capitalism.
Boccaccio’s Decameron is the first major literary work of the Italian Renaissance—or, if you prefer, the last major work of the Middle Ages. Feudalism—the social and economic system consisting of wealthy landowners and peasants—preceded the Renaissance in Europe. The peasants had three principal responsibilities. One was to fight wars by which their feudal lords obtained and increased their land holdings. Another was to work the land for these lords. Embracing both these responsibilities was their overarching responsibility to tender perfect obedience to their feudal lords. The structure of this hierarchical society derived institutionally from the Church and, more generally, from the idea of a hierarchical universe with God at the head. In the Renaissance, this agrarian arrangement yielded to a new mercantile society that loosened the influence of the Church, emphasized individual accomplishment and enterprise, and broadened the distribution of wealth, giving rise to the middle class. Human activity rather than a cosmic model determined social relations, although the idea of the Great Chain of Being provided some continuity with the Middle Ages. The Italian Renaissance lasted, roughly, from 1330 to 1550. Pasolini, who was a Marxist, felt that modern capitalism represented the rebirth of feudalism—the new feudalism. Owners and workers, whom factory and company owners exploited for the sake of their own wealth and political privilege, represented society’s principal class division. Although his film is set at the time of Boccaccio’s Decameron, Pasolini is reflecting throughout on the mechanism of social and work relations in his own day, and on the abiding mischief of Christianity’s authority, in particular, that of the Catholic Church. As a result, he includes none of the tales with characters drawn from the titled nobility; haves (the work-world rich), have-lesses, have-nots, clerics and nuns populate Pasolini’s brace of Boccaccio.
Pasolini chooses eight of the original tales, interweaving a bridge of his own invention, I suspect, in which he himself appears as the “best pupil” of Giotto di Bondone, the Florentine painter who in fact was one of Boccaccio’s favorites. The film concludes with the bridge, tempering the finality of Giotto’s conclusive utterance with an open-endedness of form. (Although it contains nearly all the stories that Pasolini chose, my copy of Boccaccio’s text, translated by Leopold Flameng, is abridged. It contains 87—all complete—of the 100 stories.)
The film opens with what turns out to be a bridge to the fourth episode. This formal device introduces the idea of the film as a woven tapestry of Boccaccio stories. The device of storytelling is touched upon, briefly, only once in the film, and out-of-doors, without reference to anyone’s confinement due to pestilence. The stories, then, just happen; they visually unfold, one after the other, most often without any sort of transition, almost suggesting a simultaneity of time—the tumbling out of human variety and life’s abundance that is the hallmark of the film’s vibrant style.
The first episode proper sets the tone. It revolves around Andreuccio, who is away from home buying horses for his father’s stable. How this boy struts! How shamelessly he parades his wealth! A local woman cons him into her quarters, telling the fool that she is his half-sister and, before robbing him, tricks him into falling into the cesspit, out of which he manages to climb onto the street, all covered in you-know-what. (Watch for the flub when he briefly looks well scrubbed.) Endlessly stupid, he is tricked by thieves into an archbishop’s sepulchre, handing up wealthy garments and accoutrements with which the holy man was buried, presuming that his cohorts will share the riches with him; but when he keeps the single prize, the archbishop’s ruby ring, for himself (to make up for being robbed earlier), the thieves lock him inside with the corpse. Luckily, other thieves pry open the tomb and Andreuccio escapes, happily skipping with his prize jewel. The second pair of thieves end up with nothing.
Wealth to the already wealthy, then, is the order of the day, although the poor can get (only) a little by stealing. We don’t like Andreuccio, the gentle woman who robs him or any of the other thieves. Instead, ordinary poor individuals in the sunlit street, as Andreuccio is led indoors, draw our sympathy; the camera glimpses these in a deceptively casual fashion. Who is the biggest thief? The one robbing them. That is represented by the archbishop, who not only possessed such wealth when alive, thereby depriving the poor of food, but nearly got to take the wealth “with him”! Andreuccio’s dumb joy as he dances with his ill-gotten jewel is a giddy reflection of the ponderously straightfaced hording of wealth that the Church conducts at the expense of the lowest of its flock. And more: doesn’t the Church know that the archbishop’s tomb will be robbed? Isn’t this part of its calculation, to ensure the continuation of its authority—this letting the poor think they’re getting away with something, as though they couldn’t be more fortunate here on earth? Meanwhile, a rich person got the ruby, two poor souls got something, and two more poor souls got bupkus. Again, Pasolini is joining Boccaccio in taking aim at the Catholic Church; but he is also taking aim at modern capitalism after Boccaccio. It is in this metaphorical application that Pasolini’s astuteness shines. By controlling the distribution of wealth, capitalism creates, on the one hand, hopelessness and unemployment and, on the other, workers at a low wage, for whom the constant threat of potential unemployment, hence starvation, keeps them in tow. Their reward—the redress of the imbalance, with owners hording the wealth achieved by the workers’ labor—lies, perhaps, in some egalitarian afterlife (“pie in the sky”). A beautifully rich, funny comedy of life, Pasolini’s film is nevertheless packed with import.
Following a bridge that extends the very opening of the film, the second episode unfolds. A handsome boy, pretending to be a deaf mute, becomes a gardener at a convent. In Boccaccio’s story (where he feigns dumbness but not deafness), Masetto da Lamporecchio also feigns being poor. In the film, however, the boy really is poor and needs the work. But the good sisters take it upon themselves to give him a really good workout servicing their long-suppressed sexual needs. This is fun for him until his cock is worn to a frazzle. Exhausted, Masetto cuts off sex with the Mother Superior, announcing that ten men couldn’t satisfy all the “hens” at the convent—a glorious confrontation with authority. He threatens to leave altogether if a more humane arrangement can’t be made—in the context of the film’s intellectual framework, a labor negotiation. The Mother Superior will cede to this, given the boy’s (sexual) power, but her immediate response, upon his hearing and speaking, is to declare the event a “miracle” and to promise the boy sainthood! Thus God is enjoined in the convent’s, by extension, the Church’s, hypocrisy, and the film is able to imply how rationalization can be employed to sustain the authority of the Church. And Masetto? He will be kept happy at the sexual whim of the convent—at the whim of the Church. He will be permitted the illusion of independence and self-determination as he is processed into being a tool of the nuns’ desires and prerogatives. I can’t resist the double meaning: the Church, through its representative (the Mother Superior), has not negotiated with him in good faith. The boy is reduced to being Church property, as indeed workers in factories and businesses become the property of owners.
In the third episode, a wife is as virtuous as the nuns are in the second. While her husband is inside a gigantic jar, cleaning it up for what she has convinced him is its sale, Peronella is leaning against it, being anally serviced by her lover. Her instructions to her spouse as to where to scrape inside the jar are really instructions to her lover as to, well, where to scrape inside her. Because he believes Peronella has sold the jar at a greater profit than he could muster for it, her husband is foolishly happy at having such a clever, seemingly virtuous wife. The price of a thing is his measure of value, and his love of profit has rendered him complacent about human relationships such as his marriage.
The fourth episode, so closely connected thematically, seems like a coda to the second. Its main character is Ciappelletto, who is introduced at the film’s outset bludgeoning a man to death and disposing of his body in a sack. In a subsequent bridge, we see him fondling a small boy, a stranger in the street. We learn he is a thief as well as a murderer and a “queer”: everything that the Church finds contemptible. (Pasolini, of course, was himself gay.) By the end of the episode, however, the Church will regard him, like potent Masetto, as being on the path to sainthood—another instance of its appropriation of someone’s life to further the cause of its own authority and mystique.
His mentor has Ciappelletto travel up north, as his agent, to collect his percentage of the profits of two usurers. Rather than turn over the money they owe, the usurers poison Ciappelletto, who as a result lies dying. In order to spare his lethal hosts disgrace and thus redeem himself, Ciappelletto presents himself to his confessor as a man overwrought by the thought of what in fact are pitifully small sins—nothing like his own. The priest believes every word of Ciappelletto’s deathbed “confession.” (Franco Citti, Pasolini’s 1961 tragic Accatone, is hilarious as Ciappelletto.) At Ciappelletto’s funeral, a swarm of friars’s hands try touching the sanctified corpse as it is carried to burial—the film’s most brilliant shot, a stunning image of mass fetishism. Oh, for just a split second of Ciappelletto’s power! What soul could resist knowing the sublimity of that surge? Both the Church and capitalism persist through the creation of their own myth, deceiving themselves while deceiving others in a masquerade of institutional virtue. Their “heroes,” their human models, are all shams, like Ciappelletto. Meanwhile, Ciappelletto’s killers will continue with their usury; the Church turns as blind an eye to that as it has turned to the murder and to Ciappelletto’s true nature.
Another kind of deception may follow in the next episode, to be completed at film’s end, in which “Giotto’s best pupil” organizes and begins a gigantic painting project inside a cathedral. “He is the Master,” we are told, “but doesn’t like to be called the Master.”
Thematically, the sixth episode is closely linked to the third. Parents ordain that their daughter and a boy, Caterina and Ricardo, marry after the father catches the young couple in bed together. The father’s reasoning? Ricardo “has plenty of money.” Everything is reduced to a business transaction.
The film returns here to Giotto’s best pupil. His lunch with friars assumes the visual form of a parody of Leonardo’s The Last Supper. However, seized by visionary inspiration, might-be-Giotto rushes away mid-meal to return to work. Fast motion brings a comical spin to the labor of “the Master” and his crew.
The seventh episode involves young lovers Elisabetta and Lorenzo. When Elisabetta’s three brothers, who are wealthy merchants by dint of an inherited family business, discover the relationship, they murder Lorenzo, who appears to Elisabetta at night, explaining his disappearance and telling her where she can find his body. The next day, she and her nursemaid visit the spot, she severs her beloved’s head and plants it in a pot of basil that she keeps in the window of her bed chamber.
In Boccaccio’s story, Lorenzo is “a young man of Pisa . . . who managed all [the brothers’] affairs.” In the film, he is from Sicily and he is a laborer in the brothers’ employ, thereby “allowing Pasolini,” according to Ben Lawton, “to state his position regarding the abuse of and disregard for southern Italy’s poor by the northern bourgeois society.” The brothers may feel disgraced by their sister’s lack of maidenly virtue, but adding salt to the wound is Lorenzo’s inferior socioeconomic status. They might have been more amenable, like Caterina’s parents, if Lorenzo also had had “plenty of money.” Pasolini may have had in mind John Keats’s 1818 poem based on the story, Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, which reduces the number of brothers by one and anticipates Pasolini’s anti-capitalistic interpretation:
With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver’d loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip . . .
Regardless, the morbidity of Elisabetta’s storage of her dead lover’s head beneath growing basil reflects, in both story and film, the lethal curb that the brothers have applied to the couple’s love. Especially in the film, though, it is a symbol of Elisabetta’s wealth—unlike that of her brothers, “wealth” born of love rather than from inheritance (to which, as a female, she was not privy) and from exploitation of workers. In a wonderful long shot, when the brothers fetch Lorenzo for their murderous excursion, we see the intense labor of those in the brothers’ employ, including Lorenzo. By contrast, we never see any of the brothers do a stitch of work.
In the eighth episode, a man has anal intercourse with a woman while her husband, who has been tricked for the occasion, watches. This spouse is convinced that the guest has magical powers and is, in fact, performing a ritual that will turn his wife into a mare so that the couple can make more money. Unfortunately, the husband cries out, as he was warned not to do, disspelling the magic, leaving his wife a woman and him a cuckold.
The ninth episode is marvelous. It concerns two friends, one of whom is profligate, the other, virtuous. They make a pact. Whoever dies first will return to the other to tell him what the afterlife is like. The sexually busy friend dies, just as the virginal one warned that he would, and returns as promised. Sex is okay! It’s not a sin! There’s no punishment for it! That very night, the living friend gets busy.
The film concludes with the master artist surveying the gorgeous work that he and his crew of artisans have wrought in the cathedral. His closing utterance, aloud to himself (and to us), is poignant, deepening the sensibility of the entire film: “Why create a work of art when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?” There is an answer to this, which the whole film provides, and therefore I am stymied by the miscomprehending response by most to what they regard as mainly a confession of failure or of art’s limitations. Why create a work of art when dreaming about it is so much sweeter? To reach out; to share something of the dream with your fellow humans. Just as Pasolini’s overflowing sexual joy, to which the imagery of The Decameron testifies, counters the Church’s prohibitions, his commitment to sharing—his delight at sharing—counters the commercial, capitalistic mean-spiritedness that the film condemns.
Pasolini made a single masterpiece, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)—not only the finest, most profound film about Jesus, but also, apart from Roberto Rossellini’s present-tense histories, cinema’s finest instance of applying neorealismo to the past. It may also be Pasolini’s most personal film in its attempt to marry his Marxism with his deep religious feeling. The Decameron belongs to the rank of those works of his, The Hawks and the Sparrows (1963) and Teorema (1968) among them, that are only a small way below such an exalted, mesmerizing achievement as The Gospel.
Tags: Pasolini
