English version

This adaptation of Chaucer focuses on four of the stories from 'The Canterbury Tales' ('The Merchant's Tale', 'The Miller's Tale', 'The Friar's Tale' and 'The Pardoner's Tale'). Pasolini appears as a fictional Chaucer who narrates the film, providing a link between the four disparate tales. As a director he emphasises and embellishes the bawdiness and the coarse humour at the expense of the verse. Pasolini is undoubtedly capable of framing beautiful images on screen, but this film wallows in sex, genitalia and excrement. The Canterbury Tales was the second part of a medieval trilogy, the first being The Decameron (1970) and the third Arabian Nights (1974). To Pasolini the trilogy was an unequivocal statement that ideology and sexuality are inseparably linked, the explicit sexuality being largely conceived as a protest against the rigid moralism of the extreme Left. However, this seems to have escaped me while watching the film. ('Dr Who' fans be warned: Tom Baker gets caught with his pants down).