The Canterbury Tales (1972) User Reviews

Pasolini dared to show the medieval era as extremely dirty, indecent, vulgar

[Nazi_Fighter_David · 7/10 · 7 September 2008]

This is the second in Pasolini's series of setting classic bawdy tales to film… In this case, he selected eight of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, including the infamous miller's tale and the incident with the red hot poker kiss…

The tales revolve around a group of pilgrims who are journeying to the shrine of Saint Thomas a Becket of Canterbury… The trip is so boring that they begin telling each other stories that soon get obscene, gory and very sexy… Pasolini adds another motif to his visualization by placing Chaucer himself into the movie, periodically cutting to him writing at his desk...

Pasolini inserts pleasure and amusement at social customs, especially marriage… Some of the stories are funny, others are deadly serious… The scene where a young man is burned for making love to another of his own sex, for example, is chilling...

In fact, Pasolini's using non professional actors, is more in keeping with the tone of the original than the usual romanticized versions...

well put together

[drystyx · 7/10 · 12 November 2012]

Making a film about the Canterbuy Tales, one that lasts one to two hours, presents one with the decision of how to go about it.

The logical approach would be to tell of the pilgrimage itself, and then splice 2 or 3 tales at a time, probably beginning with the joke tales, like the miller's.

It would be doubtful that one could get all the stories in, and still have a pilgrimage tale.

Here, the pilgrimage is pretty much forgotten, just mentioned at the beginning.

The cuts between stories are sometimes straights cuts, and sometimes back to Chaucer writing the tale.

The bawdiness is kept, although it is done more Italian style than English. There is a mixture of the two cultures involved here.

The stories stay fairly true to form.

It would take a huge budget to include the squire's story, and indeed, the squire's story would take some interpretation to finish. Sadly, it is left out.

Which leaves the pardoner's story as the "thriller" story. I was very much hoping this story, a natural finale, would be the climax.

I wasn't disappointed. The pardoner's tale is the masterpiece in terms of action and adventure. It isn't exactly the very last tale, but close enough to serve as the climax, as there are two very brief joke tales that follow it.

Would I piece it together like this? Probably not. I think each person would direct this in a different way, with about a half dozen general methods.

However, I liked the way this film was done. It stayed very true to form, in my opinion. Most of the tales are "raunchy humor" tales, showing the mores of what one would expect to be puritan people, most of them professionals in religion. This was well done.

This has not aged well

[christopher-underwood · 5/10 · 17 November 2020]

This has not aged well. It brought Pasolini to greater public attention and commercial success but along with the tawdry imitations abounding after his first of his 'Trilogy of Life' came a feeling of regret. And no wonder for though, at the time, there was much talk of liberation and free translation with a representation of the true essence of Chaucer it is a sad sight today. Apart from the much talked of appalling dub it is so clear now to see that most of the young street urchin looking cast was chosen less for their appropriateness for the movie and more as a reflection of the personal taste of the director. The buildings, inside and out are imaginatively used and beautifully shot whilst the English landscape looks divine but the coarse antics and behaviour of his, not so pretty boys, is most grating. The songs are badly sung and surprisingly annoying from the very beginning and overall this is a very difficult watch.

Scatological film that vies more towards the crass

[tomgillespie2002 · 11 August 2012]

Continuing his 'Trilogy of Life' cycle exploring medieval literature, The Canterbury Tales by Pier Paolo Pasolini, delves into some of the tales weaved within Geoffrey Chaucer's famous stories. It explores the myriad sexual depravities and allusions with bawdy gusto, featuring almost every perversion known, from voyeurism, flagellation, homosexuality, to even the "love" of a watermelon. The disparate, prurient tales are interwoven with Pasolini plays Chaucer here at his writing desk, imaging his lasciviousness upon villagers. There is even a strange comic interlude paying homage to Charlie Chaplin, in the form of Pasolini regular, Ninetto Davoli.

Whilst the visual style is similar to The Decameron (1970 - Dante Feretti again is art director), the stories do not intertwine as well here, which could create some confusion in the viewer. With a largely British cast (including Tom Baker, Hugh Griffith, Jeeny Runacre, and even Robin Askwith), the film film sometimes feels like a slightly less repressed 1970's British sex comedy (Carry On Canterbury, if you like). With its delight in sexual promiscuity and perversion, it is certainly one of Pasolini's less than intellectual affairs, and even fails to humour. Unless of course your funny bone is easily pleased by fart jokes.

With a bizarre finale set in hell (its visual design clearly inspired by the painting of Hieronymus Bosch), we see an over-sized Satan shitting out some plebeian folks, to the obscene delight of those scattered round the pits. Whilst this incredibly short ending is disgustingly joyous, it fails to save a very scatological film, that vies more towards the crass than the enlightening.

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Offensive, but with style

[Johnny B · 6/10 · 5 July 2001]

Having seen all of Pasolini's medieval trilogy inspired from international literature classics, I cannot but admit that this is his least inspired contribution. I don't know exactly what's wrong with the film - maybe it's the majority of the acting, or else it's the script. Naturally, having read the book beforehand helps to tell which tale is being shown, but assuming that the majority of the viewers have not read Chaucer's masterpiece, I doubt how many managed to guess what the tales are about. Still the movie has Pasolini written all over it: shockingly explicit scenes, watersports, unisex nudity galore (even senseless), sickening graphics of people vomiting and devils shitting monks, sex all over the place etc... Only for Pasolini admirers or for people who like an "uncut" interpretation of ambiguous medieval classics.

Chaucer adapted with a twinkle in the eye

[JuguAbraham · 7/10 · 22 February 2019]

The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin film festival. Chaucer adapted by Pasolini with a twinkle in his eye. Chaucer is played by the director. The best performances: Hugh Griffith and Alan Webb. Unlike the earlier, Pasolini work in the trilogy "The Decameron" which used lesser known actors, "The Canterbury Tales" used more well known names as actors. In both films Pasolini acts in significant roles.

Pasolini wasn't properly enlightened in Canterbury as Decameron !!!

[elo-equipamentos · 7/10 · 15 September 2019]

After watch Decameron, Canterbury tales disappointed me entirely by the way, Pasolini wasn't inspired, an auspicious production starts well, a journey thru the country until the final destiny was an encouraging enterprise to taking a fabulous tales, smart and bolded, somehow the director was so sad over his private case that downgrade the whole project, all sort of foolishness comes, nonsense, coarse language spreading all around, dirty jokes, bad behavior were kindled recklessly, some sequences were really funny, however in bad taste, on the bonus material can explain such thing, Pasolini was totally destroyed by his lover leaves him, that keep clear that the picture is still good, but miles away from the masterpiece Decameron!!

Resume:

First watch: 2010 / How many: 2 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7.5

Colourful and bold, but that's about it!

[johannes2000-1 · 4/10 · 10 March 2020]

I realize that Pasolini is considered to be one of the great (albeit controversial) film-directors of the 20th century, so it feels a bit like sacrilege to criticize some of his movies. But in this case I cannot help it: his Canterbury Tales is in my view more an ego-trip in which the director lives out his personal fantasies than a coherent movie. Even taken into consideration the fact that the subject is a loose bundle of tales, one would expect a filmmaker to see this as a challenge and try to construe something of a general cohesive storyline. Instead we see here a succession of fragmented tits and bits, mostly without head nor tail, seamlessly flowing from one into the other, with at many times unfathomable meaning or served as overtures to an intended anecdotal tale but without anything like the expected punch. As objective audience, without knowing anything of Pasolini's agenda on this movie, I would say that he put most, if not all of his efforts into the visual aspects and way too little into the writing.

It doesn't help that the acting is mostly poor and amateurish, and everyone either rattles their extensive Italian lines (obviously dubbed, often in bad lip-sync) in high pitched and loud quarrelsome tones, or we see people for minutes in silent close-up or aimlessly running to and fro. And there is hardly any musical score in this movie, except for the occasional music-making as part of the background, many scenes take place in strange, almost alienating dead-silence.

So is there nothing to praise? Well, to me the enjoyment here lies mainly in the images, with extensive amounts of extras in an extravaganza of costumes, all filmed in dazzling colours. And in the boldness of the use of nudity and sex, in a movie from 1972 mind you, and Pasolini managed to get away with it, earning with it (although I cannot for the life of me fathom the motivation of the jury) the prestigious Golden Bear in Berlin.

But to me a sequence of colourful, sexually defiant but bad-acted and incoherent scenes doesn't automatically stand for a good movie.

Eight tales about love and death.

[rathunter · 8/10 · 28 September 2004]

This movie is second of Pasolini's so called 'Trilogy of Love' (Il Decameron, I Racconti di Canterbury, Il fiore di mille e una notte; 1970-1974). All these movies are quite specific, there are said not to be that provocative or intriguing. They are greatly influenced by the fact that while directing them Pasolini was contented because of his intimate relationship with the 'innocent barbarian', actor Ninetto Davoli. It is also said that in 'Trilogy of Love' Pasolini became resigned to the present time world by escaping to the past.

However I don't think it's true. In these movies, Pasolini introduces to the audience an incorrupt world where people don't care about 'material aspects of life', they try to live at the full stretch, they seek love and, of course, sex and they do not respect 'the repressive limits imposed by religious and bourgeois morality' (Gino Moliterno). This is probably why Pasolini later declared that these three films were most ideological of his career (in his famous and long interview with Massimo Fini). I suppose Pasolini tried to confront such 'primitive' world with the world he had lived in and which he had hated so much (this confrontation is present all the time, especially by the contrast between the love and the death, by the contrast between the first tales, in which the human naked body dominates, and the last two tales in which pursuit of money causes death and perdition. Because of such end it is also suggested that I Racconti di Canterbury are very close to Pasolini's disillusioned last movie, Saló).

It is common to hear that Chaucer must have rolled over in his grave after this movie was released. But if you try to understand The Canterbury Tales in the context of Chaucer's attitude towards love in his (other) literary works, you will probably find that Chaucer would resemble to Pasolini alias Mr Chaucer ends the film with writing 'Here end the Canterbury Tales, told for the mere pleasure of their telling, Amen'.

Great movie

[mike61704 · 6/10 · 6 June 2016]

Strange at times but a most delightful tale of 8 stories from the mother land. I am confused as there isn't any x rated content in the movie. There is some nudity but nothing that warrants an x rating for sure. I would say its a mild R rated movie. Very humorous and at times strange. I enjoyed the adventurous tales but most of them are ended prematurely and with questions still unanswered. It would have been a better movie if they told 4 tales with more story to them. I never read the actual tales, but if they are anything like whats in the movie, it might be a good read. I have always enjoyed movies from the area depicted in the movie, I just wish that the stories had more content to keep me engaged more. I found myself wondering away from the movie more than once which tells me that the stories just were not interesting enough to spark my interest. That is why I think it would have been a much better movie with each tale telling more of a story then just cutting to one, 10 minutes later your cut to another story wondering what happened. Over all I would still give it a 6 out of 10 for the slapstick English humor.

Great period settings and costumes, terrible acting

[ladybug2535 · 4/10 · 25 November 2013]

The settings and costumes were period perfect--it's too bad, really too bad that this movie suffered from such bad editing and terrible acting. The Canterbury Tales is a collection of separate stories full of humor, puns and sexual escapades. The movie manages to capture the humor and sexual escapades including lots of full frontal nudity for both sexes, and the "appearance" of numerous sexual acts (though it's not pornography) but there is nothing to hang the different stories together, and little effort to even make the individual tales have any kind of coherence (especially as they quote from the stories in Middle English. This was an admirable project but it fails in terms of any real cinematic value. It's a shame, I really wanted to like it, and as so many say, the settings and the costumes truly reflect the period, and were the best parts of the movie. The worst part is the acting--but if you've read the stories and are interested in the period, the movie is worth watching, and you may appreciate the humor--it does reflect the Middle Ages in all of it's rudeness and lust for life (if anything the movie tones it down for modern audiences)---just don't expect much more than that.

Hilarious, shrewd, very funny

[lhk-2 · 10/10 · 15 July 2003]

This is a remarkable film. One usually remembers Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as difficult, religious old English burden of school, but Pasolini was smart enough to concentrate on the humor, which travels from rude slapstick (hot iron poker shoved up the villain's behind) to merciless show of greed and it's consequences. Only after the film did I take a fresh look at Canterbury Tales and lo! it was there all along... but it required Pasolini to lay it \bare, for everyone to see.

An engaging continuation of Pasolini's trilogy

[rdoyle29 · 7/10 · 1 August 2017]

Pasolini follows up "The Decameron" with this adaptation of several of Chaucer's stories. Like the proceeding film, this is an extremely earthy and bawdy adaptation of the material, celebrating life's pleasures and castigating authoritarian hypocrisy. This film is mildly inferior to "The Decameron", although it's high points, including an extended homage to Chaplin and an amazing vision of hell, are higher.

If Pasolini wanted to include this much carnality he could at least have looked as though he was enjoying himself

[Spleen · 4/10 · 18 June 2002]

So we all agree, then? This is infuriatingly opaque, turgid, smutty stodge. Speaking as someone who hasn't read Chaucer, half the time I found it hard to tell what was going on (or maybe I was merely unable to work out why it was going on), although I did detect a couple of bawdy jokes that failed to work visually and would better be told with words. (Many film-makers engage in this kind of losing battle; the Farrelly brothers tend to emerge with more credit than Pasolini does here, which isn't saying much.)

There seems to be no point to the whole other than, in Inspector Clouseau's words, "It's all part of Life's rich pageant," which means that Pasolini's film does poorly what more other films do well than any other film I can name. Both "A Canterbury Tale" (1944) and "A Knight's Tale" (2001) are better films which make direct reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (the former being much better than the latter, of course). They're also, I must confess, the only other such films I've seen.

Interesting but not Chaucer

[Shuggy · 26 February 2006]

If you watched this movie in order to get a crib of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, you'd be out of luck, and missing the point. Chaucer's underlying anti-clerical and pro-love-and-life philosophy may be there, but the substance is very different. Pasolini's 14th century England lives and dresses more like 16th Century Italy.

The Miller's Tale is much grimmer when brought to the screen than Chaucer would have intended. "And Nicholas is branded on the bum, And God bring all of us to Kingdom Come" in Coghill's cheerful popular translation, becomes something more like the execution of Edward II. Not just on, but in. And the execution of a sodomite too poor to bribe his way off the griddle seems drawn out just to make a bad joke about the seller of "griddle cakes" (frittelli) plying his trade in the crowd.

He is one of the more than fair share of handsome young men in the film, and there's more than a fair share of closeups of their middle regions, front and back, in tight-fitting breeches (not that I'm complaining).

One feature that is almost entirely absent is any sense of pilgrimage. The storytellers appear only at the beginning and end of the tale. Instead we cut back to Chaucer himself (Pasolini himself, and very handsome he is too), writing the tales at a snail's pace. There are also long (by 2006 standards) tracking shots over indifferent scenery. Yet other scenes jump disconcertingly, the start of one tale used to mark the end of the previous one.

A good time

[davidmvining · 7/10 · 19 March 2024]

If this didn't inspire Terry Gilliam and his approach to his first sole feature film, Jabberwocky five years later, I would be surprised. There's something about the loose production, handheld cameras, and exaggerated lenses and costumes that feels like a precursor to Gilliam's first solo foray into live action filmmaking. After my muted reaction to The Decameron, I was expecting to find the rest of Pasolini's Trilogy of Life to miss the mark as well (especially since the first feature is generally considered the best of the three, it seems), but I was surprisingly amused at a higher layer and more consistently with The Canterbury Tales. I had a pretty good time.

Geoffrey Chaucer (Pasolini) arrives at an inn with fellow pilgrims towards Canterbury and proposes that they entertain each other on the long journey with tales. It's the barest of frameworks brought from the original source material since we never see who's telling what tale (apparently there was more footage that Pasolini cut out that might have addressed this), and the tales begin with The Merchant's Tale with the titular merchant Sir January (Hugh Griffith) deciding to marry May (Josephine Chaplin) who does so because of January's wealth while she continues having an affair with another man. Two spiritual creatures decide to play a game and have January lose his sight for a time, increasing January's sense of jealousy and then giving the sight back while May is in a tree above him with her lover.

I think that the opening tale exemplifies why I gravitate towards this film much more than The Decameron. It's simply more fun to watch. It's less concerned with shock (which simply never interests me). It's more playful. It's less monomaniacally concerned with sex (while still including it as a factor). It's also just generally more entertaining. There are seven more tales that I'm not going to summarize, but I think my favorite would end up being The Miller's Tale about a young man who is enamored of the wife to his next-door neighbor, the carpenter. The young man concocts an elaborate ruse around an impending flood that they can only avoid by hanging large bathtubs from the ceiling, ready to cut them loose when the water gets high enough, an effort to get the carpenter in an isolated place so that the young man and the carpenter's wife can run off to bed to be with each other. There's also some extra stuff around another young man who wants to sleep with the carpenter's wife, some scatological humor, and a red-hot poker.

There's an innocence and sense of fun to all of these tales that gets nicely counterbalanced by some heavier material around death, especially as the film enters its final tellings. The final tale is about three brothers who, after threatening an old man, find a treasure trove of gold under a tree and the effort to kill each other to keep more of the money for each other. This is still told in a surprisingly light manner (the sort of tone that Gilliam would follow up on a few years later), and it continues to be nicely entertaining.

I don't see much thematically running through everything, but it's a series of lightly entertaining tales (I think my only exception would be the start of the previously described tale that relies more on shock than anything else) that move along nicely, give a few laughs along the way, and move on without overstaying their welcomes. The one part that probably edges closest to disgusting while also leaving me in guffaws is in The Summoner's Tale where we discover where the devil hides bad clergymen, and it's where the sun don't shine. It's also nice to see Pasolini regulars like Ninetto Davoli playing a Chaplinesque character in The Cook's Tale and Franco Citti playing the devil in The Friar's Tale.

It's not deeply insightful or deeply moving, but Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales is an amusing look at a recreation of Medieval England from a technically accomplished filmmaker kind of slumming it a bit by just telling bawdy stories. You can still see his concerns around class translated from his normal Italian milieu to the English (Sir January essentially buys his wife, as an example), but they're very much on the backburner, far from the forefront of the events. There is definitely also something there about sexual mores that he was probably trying to use as an attack on contemporary sexual mores in Italy (the addition of the burning of the homosexual in The Friar's Tale makes that unescapable), but, again, aside from that addition, it's mostly pushed aside in favor of bawdiness (rather than shock like in The Decameron).

It's light. It's fun. It's colorful. I had a good time with it.

all style, no substance

[Cherubin · 4/10 · 6 July 2003]

I recently rented "Canterbury Tales" because I started reading the Chaucer book and also because I liked Pasolini´s final film "Salo". However, I was very much disappointed with the results. To be sure, the film begins strongly as the first tale presented (about a young woman cheating on her elderly, temporarily blind husband) has an enjoyable sense of playfulness and brilliant camera work (especially the ambiguous, naturalistic shots of sloppy facial expressions, which are usually always a strong point for Pasolini). Even the 2 tales that followed had their merits. The story of the tax collectors played like an interesting poetic riddle and the tale of the Charlie Chaplin style "reveler" was fun in how it combined Chaplinesque innocence with things like gambling and group sex. However, after this, my appreciation of the film soon went down as the stories that followed lacked virtually anything that could be called likable. It was mostly just wooden, superficial characters hysterically shouting at each other so cartoonishly that even a seven year old would complain about bad acting while watching it and lots of cheap bodily function jokes that were done better hundreds of times elsewhere. And it also has plenty of completely unerotic sex scenes that belong in 70s Italian gross out soft porn rather than in any movie that´s meant to be taken seriously. And the infamous hell scene at the end feels like bad children´s television (e.g. "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians") with its cheap looking paper costumes and sloppy claymation. While scholars or people who lived in Italy during the 60s and 70s could probably spot intellectual criticisms of society´s hypocrisy in the movie, they really do not save it much - especially not from completely butchering the intelligence, humanity and depth of Chaucer´s original work. In any case, "Canterbury Tales" shows that no matter how artistic you make your visuals, if your movie lacks plot and characterization, they will be badly missed.

We are nothing but the entertainers of Satan

[Dr_Coulardeau · 10/10 · 4 June 2008]

We know where we are – in England – with the songs and music, the looks of these people, the way they dress, the way they look, the faces they make and the faces they have, their violent games and the first jest, and the first joke, sets the action in a fighting ring with a red lady dressed in so much crimson sanguine velvet that she looks like a cardinal, the bird of course. And the hats, Lord, or the way they dress their hairs. Holbein, Rembrandt and the Flemish school, and yet their inns cum nunneries cum brothels cum stables and a lot of welcoming remarks are real enclosed farcical and at times lethal bordellos. Most festivities take place in big halls. That's England isn't it, cold and rainy, uncertain and wet, at least as for the climate and the weather. The garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and Pan fingering his pipe is not bad at all, looking like a Stonehenge of well trimmed bush pillars. The most intriguing sequence is that of the homosexuals who are tricked into sex by some agents of the church, but only to be proposed a choice: pay or burn on the griddle. One is rich and goes through. The other is poor and burns. The scene is amplified by the dais and the canopies all around the quadrangle where it happens, by the velvet of the dresses and by the silence, by the kids watching the show, the green lawn of this quadrangle surrounded by Norman or Tudor architecture, the bringing of the faggots by half nude teens before the bringing in of the gay yelling faggot, his being tied on the griddle, the lateness of the priest and his cross and the silence again when the flames finally engulf the man. And all is seen through the eyes of a bun-vendor who does not say a word and roams behind everyone. And it is all calculated by the local bishop with the help of a consenting youth who plays the bait. And the mute witness is later revealed to be the devil enjoying the show set up for him by the good old Christian men and women. And there we start descending into a Flemish vision of Hell. And Hell is on earth with Charlie Chaplin arriving in the picture, accompanied by the traditional music of his mute films on a pipe, the cops, the cheating at the soup distribution, the cane and the bowler hat, the bored bride in a wedding, the monstrous father of the wimp bridegroom that gets creamed with the wedding cake, the strict family but the cheating mother who feeds bad Charlie in the back of the father, even a job shining, or should I say, polishing eggs, playing dice with what Dickens would have called street Arabs, and Shakespeare scoundrels I guess. And he introduces us in his dream of a bawdy paradise on earth, interrupted by two cops who arrest him and put him in a pillory. Add to that the flood. And the red widow strutting across this mess. In England religion has been turned into a business, a sham, a parody, a farce, a social carnival in which a windmill grinds corn without turning its wings, but it does not matter since the miller is a thief. But Chaucer in the film leads us to another inn-brothel of England. And an angel will take you to Hell and you better like devils and Satan and you will discover where all the friars are kept in Hell by Satan himself. You'll drown in a real colic of friars all over the world directly from under the tail of His Lord Satan. Amen for sure.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

The worst Pasolini film

[Rectangular_businessman · 1/10 · 25 June 2012]

This is simply the worst movie directed by the great Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini.

It is even worse than the unpleasant and pretentious "Salo", being boring, dull and poorly made, with many painfully unfunny fart jokes that doesn't seem to be so different than the ones that appear in many bad comedies from the recent years. Personally, I think that it's a shame that the same director of great cinematic masterpieces as "Mamma Roma" "Accattone" and "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" ended his career as director doing movies like this.

Just like the other two films from "the Trilogy of Life" (The Decameron and Arabian Nights) directed by Pasolini, this movie has almost nothing to do with the literary source in which it was inspired, being terrible as an adaptation, but even worse as a completely independent movie, lacking of any artistic or entertainment value. This movie is a big waste of time from beginning to end. It's dumb, it's unfunny, it's not enjoyable at all, and it's not interesting from any kind of perspective.

"The Canterbury Tales" is one of the most disappointing movies that I've seen in my entire life. This film doesn't any justice to the book in which it is (supposedly) inspired.

a crude, crazy, beautifully shot episodic satire with a few unforgettable scenes

[Quinoa1984 · 8/10 · 22 July 2010]

Pier Paolo Pasolini, to my estimation so far from films I've seen (which have been most of his oeuvre), wasn't a genius, at least not entirely. He could fall flat on his face or just stick his pretentious tail out too far into the wind. But he was an artist, and with his subjects he had something to say whether you liked it or not. So is the way with The Canterbury Tales, which I've been told is apart of a "trilogy of life" (along with the good Decameron and the near-masterpiece Arabian Nights), and like those films it's a narrative that is precisely loose and episodic, and the subject matter is like a Monty Python film that takes its craft seriously but still knows when to go in for the bizarre humor. Or sometimes not. Or sometimes it just doesn't work.

I never read the Chaucer Tales that are so renown to scholars and school-kids alike, but the stories in the film seem to reflect as much of its filmmaker as it does its author, if not more so. We get stories of lust and adultery and greed and ignorance in medieval, rural England. Not much time for a lot of the mythical aspects (though from time to time they are there), and there's a boatload of time for bawdy and crude comedy. One of the highlights is a scene where a young man has just finished sleeping with a woman (both very nude, it is NC-17 England and all), and the guy's friend is standing outside the window to get a kiss. She decides to give him one, her ass and a big fart right at his face. But he returns with a red hot poker and asks so nicely to get a kiss again, this time his friend's turn to give a fart, and thus get a red hot poker at his private area. So yeah, comedy like that.

Some scenes kind of meld into others, as the stories continue on with middle aged fat men who want their women and are joyful and mean in equal measure (one guy sings and amuses his woman, though she'd rather have the company of a younger man), while another man keeps trying to have his way with another maiden, a big phallus sticking right in his pants (again, NC-17). The downside to a lot of the film is that Pasolini, for all of his elegant artistry in composing shots in these rundown and rural places and in the fields of England (with DP Tonini Delli Colli), he can't really direct most of his cast well. Sometimes his use of non-professionals can work, but it doesn't help in this case that a large majority of the cast speak English, and are dubbed (Pasolini's films in general don't have live sound recorded), and some of the actors like the Fool who impresses with his capability of outrunning authorities and spilling eggs that don't break are just smiling idiots that can't act well.

That is, with some exceptions. Or rather, a bizarre exception. Tom Baker, who some of you may recall (or love) from his stint as a Doctor Who in the 1970's, appears in one of the stories. It's kind of a shock to even see him; he appears completely naked as a sexually frustrated housewife looks through a peephole, and he appears (we haven't seen his face until then) in a full 70's porno mustache and his usual wide-eyed demeanor. He also gets some other 'pleasure' in a field scene, which is also rather crazy to see, if only from the only former association with him being Doctor Who, and then another scene where he gets to overact reading from a book to the sexually frustrated housewife. It's a remarkably wild story and featuring the actor becomes more than just a curio. Ditto to the finale of the film, where we see Chaucer (who also appears during the film sometimes as the 'author' of these stories) delight in showing Satan and his minions defecating all over the place. It's like the South Park answer to Salo.

It's a film that is loaded with creative visuals, some striking Ennio Morricone music, and some really juvenile humor, not to mention the bad dubbing and hit-or-miss "acting" by the mostly non-professionals. But what carries it is the director's dedication to his vision, and the fun he's having with Chaucer and his own view on the decay and rampant sexual energy of the populous.

Unbelievable rubbish

[kenclaydon · 1/10 · 30 March 2020]

I don't know where to start. I watched this in the cinema in 1972. Just watched it again but cannot believe how rubbish it is. The depiction of 14th century England is good but that's about it. Totally incomprehensible.

Wondrous and desperate

[philosopherjack · 25 February 2018]

The last scene of Pasolini's wondrous Canterbury Tales emphasizes the narrative as an end in itself - "here end the Canterbury tales, told only for the pleasure of telling them" - and this reflects the film's sense of joyous tumble, one narrative often almost subliminally moving into another. But there's also something relentless about it, a feeling of people lacking in any real agency over themselves, as puppets of their own desires, as tools of those whose desires are stronger than their own, of the corrupt authorities, of the angels and devils which the film occasionally depicts as walking among the living. There's carnal overdrive and naturalistic nudity galore, and of course the film carries an erotic charge, but one that leads time and again to humiliation, misery, betrayal, pain, or death, and ultimately even beyond that, to one of the most tangible visions of hell ever put on film. The film is a triumph not so much of casting in the usual sense, but of human placement - an astonishing canvas of flesh and faces, suggesting people torn directly from the Medieval earth (the matchless English-language soundtrack, if you choose that option, adds considerably to this sense, when not evoking Monty Python, not that I'm saying that's a bad thing); and whether or not the various settings are historically accurate, they likewise feel discovered rather than created. At the same time, there's no doubt we're watching a work of extreme stylization, and not just in the episode that happily channels Charlie Chaplin; characters generally seem to be addressing the camera, or the void beyond it, more than each other. Which leads back to the movie's sense of desperation, that few of its possessed characters expects more from their compulsive screwing than the most fleeting of releases. The classification of the film as part of a "trilogy of life" seems, to say the least, ironic.

Uneven, with some mildly interesting stories and some pointless ones

[grantss · 4/10 · 21 May 2015]

Uneven, with some mildly interesting stories and some pointless ones.

Based on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Pier Paulo Pasolini's adaptation doesn't do the book much justice. Many of the stories are plain dull and pointless. Some are interesting, but then end anti-climatically. (This is worse, in a way, as you get your hopes up of a decent story, and then it doesn't really go anywhere).

Quite similar to Pasolini's previous work, The Decameron, in many respects. Also doesn't have anything that ties the stories together (although The Decameron did at least have a summarising statement at the end, which was reasonably profound).

Performances here are better than the The Decameron, though there are some absolute shockers again. The lead character in the Chaplinesque scene involving the egg salesman takes the cake in terms of hammy acting.

Great fun

[PimpinAinttEasy · 8/10 · 16 January 2019]

Above all, this film is good fun. Pasolini maintains the freewheeling don't give a hoot attitude of Chaucher's poem. The film is damn erotic while also capturing the idyllic life in medieval England. Back then, they did not even have books to get distracted by. The only entertainment was sex. And there is a lot of sex in this film. A lot of toilet humor too. Next time somebody looks down upon toilet humor (people farting into each other's faces and sticking knives up each other's buttocks), show them this film. I had read the poem as part of my English literature course and I always knew THE REEVE's TALE would make a great film.

(7.5/10)

Funny, ugly, but never dull

[JasparLamarCrabb · 4/10 · 13 November 2010]

It's entertaining but certainly not for the faint of heart. Pier Paolo Pasolini's take on (at least some of) Chaucer's ribald tales is grotesque, funny, ugly and never dull. Pasolini himself plays a particularly cadaverous looking Chaucer and the large cast of both English & Italian actors is excellent. Hugh Griffith plays the blustery Sir January and Josephine Chaplin is his unlikely May in "The Merchant's Tale," the most flat-out entertaining vignette. Laura Betti plays it especially naughty in "The Wife of Bath's Tale." Tom Baker is her unlucky fifth husband. "The Summoner's Tale" is absolute insanity. It's far more Pasolini than Chaucer, as if Ken Russell had directed The Three Stooges! The great cinematography is by Tonino Delli Colli.