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Rating: With the second part of his "trilogy of life," Pasolini translates his renowned flashes of grotesque, satire, and sexual-erotic scabrousness into the medieval English setting depicted in Geoffrey Chaucer's eponymous work.
Although the extreme complexity of the literary version of the Canterbury Tales is not preserved—partly due to a significant reduction of the original screenplay—the narrative proposed by Pasolini perfectly mirrors the tragicomic reality of late medieval society, a reality that is even exacerbated in the most succinct, hidden, and enigmatic details. In a context where the untouchable and indisputable solemn sanctity of the Catholic religion was easily eluded by a series of allegories bordering on the most crass human carnality, difficult to contain within the straw walls of the backward London counties, the ambitions of the director become clear right from the start of the film: the strictly chosen bouquet of Chaucerian tales is nothing but an exquisitely Pasolinian pretext to wittily mix the sacred and the profane (more profane than sacred, actually, ndr.), revelry and clerical severity, masked spirituality and manifest voracity.
And so Pasolini's Middle Ages transforms into a magnificent theater of nudity, deceptions, traps, cunning, and naivety, a world in which significant deterrents to sexual expression (not even homosexual expression, though threatened by the stake) were nonexistent, an expression not limited to mild intercourse but which openly encroached into the most ferocious voyeurism or a proto-naturalism almost like an Earthly Paradise, a pond of Nymphs. A scenario that further avoids the flaunting of pure feelings and triumphant love, platonically rarefied: high-sounding marriages that serve as contracts easily rescinded by the dominant party, see the bizarre intelligence of the wife, splendidly skilled and smart in duping the husband-king-lord-squire when the latter visually notices the intrigues with the handsome young man of the moment, gossipy women who divorce even before experiencing widowhood and entertain themselves with dashing university students whose members are not withered like the (non) deceased husbands, ménage-a-trois created through hilarious skits similar to Laurel & Hardy... and so on.
A further step by Pasolini towards the artistic exasperation of human carnal appetite and its various effects on their neighbors (an exasperation that will culminate in the chilling Salo), The Canterbury Tales quietly begins, not only with the introduction of the pilgrims to Canterbury seeking to ward off the journey's boredom through the famous sequence of tales, but also with the start of the first tale of Sir January and the unfaithful bride May: a probable lord/ruler of an unspecified city, Sir January, decides to take a wife, specifying her obligatory youth, and declares a sort of competition among the girls. It is only with the choice of May, who has a better backside than the competitors, that Pasolini initiates the humorously erotic effluvium of his work, a swirl of mockery with an ever-present spicy red backdrop. In this regard, the passage from one narrative to another transforms into a simple introduction by Chaucer/Pasolini who, almost sluggishly (in one instance, he even needs to be awakened by his collaborator), writes the titles of the individual tales on paper, like an atavistic opening card of feature films.
Very curious are also the dialogues: in the (successful) attempt to mock the factory of false bigotries of the high castes and the common people, Pasolini puts solemnly high-flown dialogues in the speakers' mouths, the same ones they voluntarily enunciate without expression and conviction, almost to reveal the uselessness of verbal grandiosity and poetic-regal brilliance in environments diametrically opposed to the assumed refinement of this orality. On one hand, there is the pseudo-refinement of intentionally anachronistic and inappropriate dialogical expression, on the other, the genuine dirtiness of "domestic affairs" that, moreover, do not remain confined within individual private walls. An orgy of hungry and libidinous lovers of all ages (young, fledgling boys, but also widows, old maids, crude rulers) appears before us, an active sexual panorama that almost no one tries to suppress: the rise of the courts, squares, and markets becomes instead the pretext to best express carnality, dramatically renouncing the virginal religious exasperation of infinite taboos. Then the bed, whatever it may be, is conquered through a dazzling series of tricks: it is here that the childish naivety of the bigoted believer suffers the most abhorrent tortures of the semi-agnostic wolf, the easy manipulator of others' fragile consciences and knowledge. The Canterbury sanctuary, the destination of pilgrim-storytellers, then becomes an unreachable Eden, a destination even the wanderers disdain in their most unconscious inner selves.
Comparisons between the Canterbury Tales and current reality are obvious: what needs to be highlighted is Pasolini's proud attempt to demonstrate Man's inherent tendency to use all his means to express the carnality and materiality of his essence, regardless of any superior-transcendental-spiritual obligations. A reality that unfortunately continues to be confused, manipulated, and tampered with by those who transform carnality and materiality into enterprises, lobbies, and shopping centers.
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