Film Review: The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury, 1972)

To contemporary audiences accustomed to rigid genre boundaries, it may seem peculiar that a film featuring graphic nudity, scatological humour, and a scene in which Satan defecates corrupt monks could win the top prize at a major international film festival. Yet, the early 1970s were a uniquely tumultuous period in cinema, where the walls separating arthouse ambition from commercial exploitation were remarkably porous. The Sexual Revolution, unfolding on screen as much as in society, created a market hungry for transgressive content, and few filmmakers navigated this terrain with as much ideological fervour and artistic contradiction as the Italian poet-philosopher Pier Paolo Pasolini. His 1971 adaptation of Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone became an unexpected box-office sensation in Italy, spawning a low-budget exploitation subgenre – the “decamerotici” – which used medieval and Renaissance literature as a flimsy pretext for sex and bawdry. Pasolini, ever the iconoclast, promptly exploited his own success with what can be seen as its spiritual sequel: his 1972 adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. A film of wild tonal swings, from charming ribaldry to grim brutality, it is a fascinating, flawed monument to a brief moment of cinematic anarchy.

Chaucer’s seminal work had inspired artists for centuries, including Powell and Pressburger’s whimsical, WW2 propaganda piece A Canterbury Tale (1944). Pasolini’s version, arriving nearly three decades later, is a far more literal, if radically selective, adaptation. Mirroring the anthology structure of The Decameron, the film uses the framing device of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury, with Chaucer himself (played by Pasolini in a silent, scribbling cameo) recording their stories. From Chaucer’s twenty-four tales, Pasolini selects just eight, and his criteria for selection are glaringly apparent: almost every segment is laden with nudity – male and female – implicit but graphic sexual activity, and a relentless focus on bodily functions. This is not a faithful translation of the text’s breadth but a deliberate curatorial act, focusing exclusively on tales of desire, greed, and hypocrisy, filtered through Pasolini’s unique blend of Marxist critique and earthy sensuality.

As with any anthology, the quality is profoundly uneven. The film’s highlights are those that embrace its farcical, comedic potential. The “Merchant’s Tale,” featuring the formidable Welsh character actor Hugh Griffith as the foolish, elderly Sir January, is a deft piece of comedy. Griffith’s performance, all bluster and blindness, perfectly contrasts with the youthful sensuality of Josephine Chaplin’s May, who conducts an affair with the squire Damian (Oscar Fochetti) under her husband’s very nose – and literally in his garden. The humour here is broad but effective, rooted in character and the timeless comedy of cuckoldry. Similarly, “The Cook’s Tale” on occasion provides a burst of anarchic energy, with Pasolini’s muse and lover Ninetto Davoli playing the dissolute apprentice Perkin. In a deliberately anachronistic and bizarrely charming experiment, Davoli mimics the mannerisms and costume of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, turning the segment into a piece of medieval slapstick. It feels entirely disconnected from the rest of the film, yet its playful absurdity is a welcome respite.

However, the film’s tonal balance is frequently shattered by segments of startling darkness and grotesquerie. The depiction of a homosexual affair in one tale culminates not in comedy but in horrific tragedy: the man, caught in flagranti delicto and unable to bribe the authorities, is burned at the stake for sodomy. The scene is presented with a stark, brutal matter-of-factness that feels tonally alien to the surrounding ribaldry. This dissonance peaks in the film’s notorious finale, an adaptation of “The Friar’s Tale” set in Hell. Here, Pasolini abandons narrative for a grotesque pageant of devils tormenting corrupt clergy, culminating in the image of Satan (a giant, demonic figure) defecating a continuous stream of monks from his anus. While intended as a scatological satire on ecclesiastical greed, the sequence feels shockingly crude and gratuitous, a piece of visual outrage that seems designed purely for provocation. It leaves a sour, nihilistic aftertaste that undermines the more life-affirming vulgarity of earlier segments.

Other flaws stem from pacing and editorial choices. The segment featuring Laura Betti as the Wife of Bath, while thematically central to Pasolini’s celebration of carnal knowledge, drags and feels overlong. Furthermore, the production was reportedly fraught with personal difficulty for Pasolini, stemming from the collapse of his relationship with Ninetto Davoli, who left him to marry a woman. This personal turmoil may have impacted the final edit; many scenes were shot but cut to reduce runtime for commercial distribution, and these are now lost. The resulting film can feel both baggy and truncated, with abrupt transitions and a lack of rhythmic cohesion that The Decameron, for all its roughness, managed more adeptly.

Despite these artistic inconsistencies, the film was a resounding commercial success, outperforming even Il Decamerone. A public reveling in the new permissiveness flocked to see it, while many left-wing critics, perhaps wishfully, interpreted its carnival of medieval debauchery as a pointed ideological critique of bourgeois society and repressive traditions. This reading was enthusiastically embraced at the 1972 Berlin International Film Festival, where the film’s premiere was a smash and it was awarded the Golden Bear – a testament less to its cohesive artistry than to its transgressive energy aligning perfectly with the counter-cultural spirit of the era. Pasolini would complete his “Trilogy of Life” with Arabian Nights (1974), but The Canterbury Tales remains its most chaotic and contentious entry.

Ultimately, Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales is a film of compelling contradictions. Its irreverence possesses a certain charm for cinephiles nostalgic for a time when cinematic rules were in flux. There is genuine vitality in its best comedic moments and in its unapologetic, almost joyous, depiction of the body. Yet, as a coherent cinematic work, it is severely hampered by erratic editing, wild tonal discrepancies, and a tendency to substitute shock for substance. Pasolini’s ambition to celebrate the primal, pre-capitalist life force of Chaucer’s world often gets lost amidst sequences that feel merely crude or cruel. Consequently, it cannot be wholeheartedly recommended as a “proper” piece of cinema on par with his greatest works. Instead, it stands as a fascinating historical curiosity: a bold, messy, and deeply flawed artifact from the brief window where arthouse intellectualism and exploitation cinema met in a bewildering, and occasionally brilliant, collision.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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