This DVD is not the director’s cut that won the top prize at the 1972 Berlin Film Festival. That version ran 140 minutes while this one clocks in at 112 minutes. That’s almost 30 minutes of missing footage which no doubt explains the choppy quality of the editing and the incoherent nature of some of the stories. I first saw the English language version of this movie when it played in U.S. theaters back in 1980.
There was no NC-17 rating back then and so it was rated X. I watched as within the first hour virtually everyone walked out on the film. Those expecting a MASTERPIECE THEATRE version of Chaucer were scandalized ( and those expecting an X rated version of classic literature (remember GRIMM’S FAIRY TALES FOR ADULTS?) didn’t get the sex they were looking for. While there were sex scenes, it was the full frontal male nudity that got the X rating (the same as today). That and the infamous ending which still has to be seen to be believed. So does a fully nude, pre-DR WHO Tom Baker in the WIFE OF BATH’S TALE.
If you are familiar with the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini (who plays Chaucer) then the nature and the look of the film will come as no surprise. In addition to being a filmmaker, Pasolini was a poet, a Marxist, a gay rights activist, and a political agitator. It was the last two activities that led to his murder in 1975. His films have a deliberately primitive style that recalls the films of D. W. Griffith and those of Italian Neorealism. Pasolini deliberately used non-professionals in many of his films to achieve the look he wanted and to get “unaffected” performances.
The film was made in several of Chaucer’s English locations giving the stories a real sense of verisimilitude. The fact that Sergio Leone’s regular cameraman Tonino Delli Colli was also Pasolini’s regular cameraman tells you that Pasolini deliberately wanted a cinema-verite look. Yes the performances are uneven and the dubbing is occasionally haphazard but that doesn’t take away from the film’s overall effectiveness. Criterion has recently issued a beautiful restoration on DVD & Blu-Ray as part of Pasolini’s TRILOGY OF LIFE set.
The Capsule Critic 