Pier Paolo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life

In the early 1970s, Pier Paolo Pasolini—an Italian gay radical author and filmmaker who shocked and fascinated the European intelligentsia—attracted a larger international audience with this gleefully lusty trilogy: The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974), all of which celebrated the pleasures of the flesh by retelling bawdy tales drawn from Boccaccio, Chaucer, and the legendary Thousand and One Nights. Pasolini cast these stories in graphically comic, erotic terms, emphasizing the muck of the environment and the purely sensual desires that drive men and women to acts of greed and carnal indulgence. While plenty of skin is on display here, the nudity is always presented in warts-and-all fashion (mostly featuring amateurs chosen for their non-movie-star looks) and earthy surroundings. Pasolini himself appears as an assistant to the painter Giotto to reflect on the inferiority of a completed artwork compared with one's dream of what it might have been, a hint—perhaps—of the filmmaker's later disenchantment, which led him to repudiate the trilogy. All three films feature stylishly evocative and often astonishing imagery (such as the surrealistic vision of hell in The Canterbury Tales)—that shines in the new transfers here. Presented on remastered DVD and debuting on Blu-ray, the set's abundant extras include visual essays on The Decameron and Arabian Nights; documentaries on The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron; deleted scenes from Arabian Nights; the 2005 TV documentary Via Pasolini on the filmmaker; interviews with composer Ennio Morricone and production designer Dante Ferretti; archival footage of Pasolini at the Berlin Film Festival; and an illustrated booklet of critical essays, along with a translation of Pasolini's “rejection” of the trilogy. Clearly designed for adult audiences—The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights both carry NC-17 ratings—this is highly recommended. (F. Swietek)