Fratelli Taviani
Maraviglioso Boccaccio

I thought and wrote that delving into Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is a bit like rummaging and feasting in the Land of Cockaigne or Bengodi. This is why, around the 70s and 80s of the last century, screenwriters and authors of the prolific cinema of the Bel Paese drew heavily from the work, deriving plots and scripts at will.

During those years, the Taviani brothers were engaged in something else: they skillfully revived the work of another master of the genre, Luigi Pirandello, who exercised in his literary laboratory by writing the Novelle per un anno. In their Kaos, one breaths the Pirandellian atmospheres immersed in a pre-industrial, magical, and terrible Sicily where its inhabitants coexist with the ancestral myths that dwell there.

With these premises, I begin to watch with numerous expectations this "Maraviglioso Decameron" by the Taviani.

But all expectations were thoroughly disappointed.

In fact, there's nothing marvelous in it at all.

The film begins like this.

In Florence, the plague epidemic spreads, so ten young people leave the city and live away from the rest of the population for two weeks. The space given to them and their rules (they will divide tasks, tell one story each day, refrain from making love) is too much and adds nothing.

As in the book, the framework will serve as a trait d'union between the stories.

And everything would be fine if the youngsters didn't seem like spoiled and pretentious kids at a costume party.

At regular intervals, extraordinary stories are told:

Catalina, the wife of Niccoluccio Caccianimico, struck by the plague, is exiled from home and, mistaken for dead, is left in a church crypt. Messer Gentile di Carisendi, in love with her, nurses her back to life; comforted, the woman rejects Nicoluccio and embraces the love of Gentile. Bruno and Buffalmacco make a fool of the foolish Calandrino with the prank of the Elitropia. Ghismunda is a young widow, daughter of Tancredi, king of Salerno; she falls in love with a shop boy. Tancredi has him killed and makes Ghismunda receive his heart in a goblet given to her by the young man. Ghismunda then kills herself by drinking poison from the goblet brought to her. A happy love story that spans the cells of a convent is told after the happy ending episode of the abbess and the breeches, and finally, the nobility of spirit of Federigo of Alberighi is recounted, who will find in the end the deserved reward.

What more could one wish for?

I would have wanted lightness and irony, the tale becoming life and life becoming tale, tragic love and cheerful love; I would have wanted the people, no one witnesses the depicted events, I would have wanted the glances, I would have wanted the noise. I would have wanted wit, the ability to story-tell, to listen and understand. I would have wanted laughter. I would have wanted life.

All this is missing.

But the film also has its merits

that only the viewer

who desires to watch this film

will find.