JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

zolaaar There are at least hundreds of reasons why I like Il Decameron so unbelievably much, a film that, in retrospect, always feels like a whole night of various kinds of wonderful dreams. First of all, there is this incredible variety of faces and characters in those stories and episodes that are both, alternating comic and tragic. I especially love the episodes with the three brothers and their poor sister, the one with two "nightingales" on the roof top, the side plot with Franco Citti and, of course, the self-ironic part which Pasolini plays himself. I also like the two big long shots à la Bosch and Giotto (with my woman Silvana Mangano as Madonna in the latter). I like the film's rich choral fresco, the joyful and sensual atmosphere which surrounds the often bitter fate of the characters, the transformation of literary and cinematic material to an impudently carnal and physical matter, which consists of erections, stomachaches, hunger, excrements. I like how the film laughs about life and sexuality and frequently meets death.There's always a constant, circuiting movement where all characters are driven by the desire to improve their living conditions and to fulfill their wishes. While doing so, they come to know betrayal and disappointment and therefore reckon with the reality of a world that is mean and unfair to them. There are the rich and the poor (such as Lisabetta and her brothers and Lorenzo), the smart and the naive, the saints and the sinners, the self-pleasing and the troublemaker. Those crowd scenes that often connect the episodes of all these swarming people and colours, where always a special incidence of light, a striking gesture of a figure, an effective angle catches the eye, are especially beautiful. And finally there's the cut with these smooth counterparts of environment and human figure, of static takes and wild tracking shots (i.e. the wonderful chase in the woods of Lorenzo and the three brothers with its sudden standstill, the transition of the lightness of the play to an ominous shadow). And the shots of Ninetto silently dancing himself outside the church or Lisabetta hugging the plant pot with tears running down her cheek are the ones I will never forget.

Cristi_Ciopron In Passolini's synthesis, or blend of realities and fantasy, the realistic intention is very discernible and underlined: it is obvious he meant to give a taste of the Middle Ages as he perceived that epoch, and as he thought things looked like. Hence the flavor of his adaptations—the depiction of a world that is weird, loony, wild, brutal, and evidently godless. He tried to delineate a world that lives out of its own instincts and animal robustness in the biological accepting. It is, needless maybe to add, a leftist reading. Passolini's dire fantasies of orgy and brutality and sacrilege seemed to find a very propitious ground here. The sadness, the intended, meant, deliberate sadness of this movie is tearing-it expresses the desolation and emptiness of a devastated world, witnessed but not cured by an artist's testimony; the aesthetic credo has only a symbolic and ultimately personal value. Not the physical joy, nor the hedonism or sexual beatitude or merriness is at the DECAMERON's world heart—but the sadness. This sadness does not come from a century devastated by fear, anarchy and insecurity—but rather from within—as it is it, the named sadness, who molds the exterior world and enhances and colors the perception. Sad and almost desolate movie; atheism consequently explored and brought to its final deadly conclusions. Passolini was one of the artistically relevant artists. I abhorred SALO, I enormously liked THE DECAMERON, and I see the link between the both—Passolini' s drives, his need for sardonic Fascist (ultimately Nazi) fantasies. I do not mean to denounce him, but to show that what is here sadness is vehemence elsewhere; the man was a decadent, a corrupt man, not only witness but also part of the decay. His medieval fantasy, with its invented realism, is a devastated, sad land, a waste country of cold feverishness and cruelty—yeah, the impression here is one of dry cruelty and meanness and fanatic compulsions brought together by Passolini's sadness. I know that, besides the very obvious naturalism that is fundamentally symbolic, he also meant to bring the sad poetry of a bitter tenderness. Many take his adaptations for the opposite of what they are—for some kind of CARRY ON … popular comedies; on the contrary, they are mean decadent shows pierced by both Passolini's sadness AND his sense and representation of sadness. Aesthetically, his DECAMERON is quite rich; an atheist's credo, violent and grim and cruel and with that fanaticism and grimness and uncanny sharpness that make a better impression here than in SALO. The man was, I repeat, rather rotten and dirty. Nasty also, and twisted. The needed innocence is severely poisoned by sadness and despair. The DECAMERON, work of beauty and gusto, is poisoned by Passolini's radical despair and self—destructive drives; in his case, it seems unavoidable to bring his hidden, secret tendencies and his biography into discussion. He constantly harmed himself ;yet to pity him would be to abase and insult him. He deserves better. With the DECAMERON, he meant something—he meant his own sadness. Waugh spoke about people with the mind of a genius and the soul of an animal; of Passolini the opposite is true. Yet his heart finished by being severely damaged as well. The sex scenes are very good—they look like rough porn by a skilled maestro—the Perronella episode, or the one with the two adolescents. He was an injured, torn and twisted man (and of these things, either inner or exterior, one should speak without phony piety but without inappropriate indiscretion as well), moderately interesting (he was not as compellingly interesting as ,say, Antonioni or even Visconti or Fellini). As a personality, he was patently second hand . Yet he clearly was no Brass either. Put extremely simply, he had something to say; not only he could have had—but he indeed had. He created some things; his interest, therefore, as an artist far surpasses that as a man. He was closer than Visconti, maybe, to the grim, decadent, twisted Neo—Fascist porn aesthetics that will be illustrated by Mme. Cavani, by Brass and Bertolucci (and, of course, the many genre filmmakers). He had a temperament; he was a decadent (no one is structurally a decadent, I presume); these made his films what they are. His films show him mean, cruel, fanatic, and sometimes, as in the DECAMERON, sharp and inspired. When uninspired, he was maybe worse than Zeffirelli; when focused, he was far better, and infinitely sharper. If he, as a man, had any sense for his literary sources, this is far from obvious in his movies. In his thorough and mean atheism, offensive and narrow, he is as mean, delirious and fanatic as Buñuel. He hated the Holy Church as if he did this from Hell. He had not a drop of generosity in him. This tearing sadness is a valid and intended aesthetic result. The product of a decadent creativity and imagination, it is nonetheless imposing. This world of imagination is innerly voided, dramatically emptied and hence mechanical—feverish and cold visions of a waste humanity, excluded from life, left prey to its own base determinism; was this dream the world desired by Pasolini? There is something fundamentally ill and rotten and ailing in this world—almost the contrary of what the book meant. Not a trace of merriment—but a nihilist and sincere, true melancholy and desolation. The heart cut away from the life—and from the source of all life as well. The creation of a man untrue to himself as a man. These subtle values of Pasolini's daring vision are at least interesting as the picturesque and rough sex scenes.

elshikh4 The tragedy is that this piece of rubbish was part of my curriculum while I was studying cinema. So imagine how I was forced to watch it in complete. Believe me going through hell is much much easier. Our professor told us that this is some film ???, but he never thought that we'd disagree or assume the apposite. I don't think that there is any gods on earth, we're only humans, so all the filmmakers, therefore they CAN make mistakes, bad movies.. Or very bad too. The main problem wasn't that art, by all means, is susceptible to endless points of view, but that a lot of people just don't get it, that every single human got his own genuine taste, his own opinion, hence what I suppose it the greatest movie ever made, can also be your worst one ever, and how that is right both ways, but how many people can understand this correctly?. So my professor believes in this movie, and simply I don't. However, the only way to evaluate this "thing" is by measuring it by its original intent to show us different kinds of old folk stories or whatever to catch on this society's mentality, imagination, and nature. To tell you the truth, Mr. Pier Paolo Pasolini as the scriptwriter and the director made it too unbearable to watch in the first place. The movie is so UGLY. I can't stand this, so how about analyzing it, then discovering the potential beauty in it !! It's beyond your mind hideousness, and strangely not for the sake of the movie's case or anything, it's for the sake of the unstable vision of Pasolini. His work is so primitive to underdeveloped extent. The deadly cinematic technique, the effective sense of silliness, and the incredible horribleness made everything obnoxious. Look at the atrocious acting, the unfruitful cinematography, the awfully poor sets, .. OH MY GOD I've got the nausea already. It can terminate your objectivity violently as watching this movie is one true pain like taking the wisdom tooth off by a blind doctor. There are dreadful nightmares which could be more merciful than this. So originally, how to continue THAT just to review it fairly ? Actually, you don't. As this very movie doesn't treat you fair at all. There is really memorable scene in here where some boys are peeing into the eye of the camera (!) I'm trying to connect some things like that with Pasolini's end as murdered.

tedg Film lovers know "Andrei Rublov," that Russian film about an icon painter. The beauty of the film comes in part because the filmmaker is on the same quest as his character, and that quest has as its core the discovery of beauty. The interesting thing about movies is that they create and sustain a fantasy world that lives beyond any one movie and into which we assume each movie is born. That world has its own type of beauty, one born of color and glamor and poise.Paosolini does the same thing as Tarkovsky, but where Tarkovsky dealt with cosmic beauty and recognition, this artist has simpler goals: to engage with flesh, to flow with the simple streams of ignoble daily motion, and to discover beauty in that plain world.Oh, what a terrific cinematic place to visit! This is a far from that collection of movie metaphors and beauty as we can go. There is no movie acting here. There is no external beauty. There is no recourse to familiar characters or representation. As usual, he draws his source material from matter that is not only before cinema, but before any popular writing.And he works with that material outside any movie tricks. Well, he still has that Italian tendency to believe that the world is populated by characters and not situations or any sort of fateful flow. Just people who do things. Lots of little things, usually associated with pleasure.So if you are building a world of cinematic imagination you need to have this as one of your corners. That's silly, every one of us is building a cinematic imagination — we cannot avoid it. What I mean to say is that if you are building an imagination, some of which you understand and can use, some of which you actually want and can enjoy without being sucked into reflex...If you want to just relate to people as people and test how easy it is to find grace in the strangest of faces, then this is your movie voyage for the night.One rather shocking thing is how the nudity works. In "ordinary" film, we thing nothing of seeing two people humping and moaning, nude pelvises grinding is the most hungry of ways. But we gasp when some genital is shown. Here, the exact reverse is found: no shyness about the obvious existence of genitals, an erection even. A sleeping girl with her hand in her lover's crotch. DIsplayed as if it were in the same cinematic territory as the faces he finds.But when these characters lay on each other for sex, we have the most prurient of actor's postures. I think this was done simply to avoid an automatic sweep into ordinary film ways. It has that effect anyway.I don't know anyone that chooses more interesting faces. Distinctly Southern European, odd atypical faces.And finally, there is the bit of his own story inserted, the artist in the church. Creating scenarios of rich life. In the movie, the most amazing scenes are those that have little or nothing to do with the story. There's a "death" tableau that could be the richest single shot I have ever seen, anywhere.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.