The Canterbury tales = I Racconti di Canterbury (E)

The second part of Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” series continues his celebration of pre-modern storytelling and culture. Based on the tales of Chaucer, Pasolini himself plays the author who faithfully scribes the stories told to him by a group of peasants on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Pasolini’s film manages to evoke the smells, sounds and landscapes of medieval England. Though featuring some of his regular Italian actors (Franco Citti, Laura Betti, Ninetto Davoli), Pasolini also used a large cast comprising British character actors as well as British non-actors (whose non-professional looks and carriage grace the film with an earthy beauty). As the trilogy celebrates a pre-industrial and pre-bourgeois sexuality, “The Canterbury Tales” is full of polymorphous coupling, comic puns, and slapstick about sex, sin and love. Though the film does not shy away from Chaucer’s religious moralism - the Devil and evil are constant presences in this medieval world - Pasolini’s gaze falls far more lovingly on the sweet absurdity and eternal passion of the carnal body. Filmed on location in England, and featuring some of the most stunning architecture of the eleventh and twelfth century as sets, “The Canterbury Tales” is ultimately a joyous and very funny elegy to the faces, bodies and culture of a vanishing peasant past. Music by Ennio Morricone, featuring his selections and arrangements of traditional Medieval odes and ballads. In Italian with English subtitles.