The Decameron

The Decameron (Il Decameron, 1971) is an Italian historical comedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini from Boccaccio's 14th-century collection of tales. The film took the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and became the first part of Pasolini's celebrated Trilogy of Life.

Pasolini selected nine stories from the original hundred and wove them into a portrait of medieval Naples and Sicily — scabrous, carnivalesque, and surprisingly tender by turns. A convent of nuns hides a lover they've passed between them; a scoundrel talks a priest into granting him absolution on his deathbed; three brothers track down the man their sister has been meeting in secret. The frame holds all this together through the figure of the painter Giotto — played by Pasolini himself — who wanders through the chaos painting a fresco and dreaming of perfect art while imperfect life churns around him. Franco Citti and Ninetto Davoli, regulars from across Pasolini's filmography, anchor several of the comic threads.

Shot on location in the back alleys and markets of Naples, the film has a rough, physical immediacy — sweat, noise, actual crowds — that keeps it far from the velvet-and-candles version of the Middle Ages. Pasolini took Boccaccio's frankness seriously: desire, comedy, and death share the frame without apology. What makes the film still interesting is how little distance it puts between the fourteenth century and now. Stream The Decameron (1971) on iFILM.