The Canterbury Tales - 1972

 Slam dunked that fucking year broooooooo!

The Canterbury Tales is a collected series of stories by Geoffrey Chaucer, written between 1387 and 1400.  They are loosely fable-like comedic and erotic stories with humor, and plot wise and character wise unconnected.  I mean in the movie at least, I haven't read the actual book.

Pasolini has his Trilogy of Life, with this movie, The Decameron, and Arabian Nights.  I have Arabian Nights in the same boxset as this so I will hopefully get around to watching it as well.  This one is certainly like The Decameron, albeit with a central "storyteller" figure that I don't remember Decameron having.  In this movie it is Pasolini himself as Chaucer, a wandering writer who seemingly just thinks up stories and writes them down - they don't seem to be things he's witnessing in the moment.

There's a lot of these stories in the movie, it's a 2 hour movie and the stories can be short, so I'm not going to try to recall them by any means.  The through line with them seems to be that most of them are somewhat sexual in nature, a lot of them center around an almost fable-like "lesson" that maybe we would learn or maybe we would have to be told, and most of them are humorous in intent.

There is also nudity in almost every one of them, I guess that's a through line as well.  

I'm not going to be able to remember all of these, but some are certainly better than others. There’s some memorable moments in no particular order: the singing Italian boy that has a threesome and gets executed, the guy getting the red hot poker up the ass, the guy pissing on people randomly, and of course the best sequence, a Noah’s ark parallel wherein they act as if a flood is coming to sleep with a guys wife. 

The thing about these is they are different degrees of fun and tedious. The film is a long 2 hours and it doesn’t have the warmth and vibe that The Decameron had. These feel almost oddly stilted and nonsense some times. I almost wonder if they’re over in the book, or if they are supposed to be so disjointed. Nothing against the writing, it’s 1378 and I’m not hoping for a 3 act structure. It’s just definitely different. 

Canterbury is a strange movie, and I will repeat a statement here: I’d love to see this kind of thing come back. If everything is truly cyclical, I’d adore to see something this strange and plotless and sexual and…oddly innocent come back. 

Because that is the unique tone here, same with The Decameron. Because it’s not necessarily cutting edge in comedy or sexual provocation anymore, these instead feel like watching weird Monty Python sketches, or something similar in that vein. You almost expect Michael Palin to come in as a shrew woman. 

This is not as good as The Decameron no matter what you do. It’s fun and it has its moments. 3 stars