We know where we are – in England – with the songs and music, the looks of these people, the way they dress, the way they look, the faces they make and the faces they have, their violent games and the first jest, and the first joke, sets the action in a fighting ring with a red lady dressed in so much crimson sanguine velvet that she looks like a cardinal, the bird of course. And the hats, Lord, or the way they dress their hairs. Holbein, Rembrandt and the Flemish school, and yet their inns cum nunneries cum brothels cum stables and a lot of welcoming remarks are real enclosed farcical and at times lethal bordellos. Most festivities take place in big halls. That's England isn't it, cold and rainy, uncertain and wet, at least as for the climate and the weather. The garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and Pan fingering his pipe is not bad at all, looking like a Stonehenge of well trimmed bush pillars. The most intriguing sequence is that of the homosexuals who are tricked into sex by some agents of the church, but only to be proposed a choice: pay or burn on the griddle. One is rich and goes through. The other is poor and burns. The scene is amplified by the dais and the canopies all around the quadrangle where it happens, by the velvet of the dresses and by the silence, by the kids watching the show, the green lawn of this quadrangle surrounded by Norman or Tudor architecture, the bringing of the faggots by half nude teens before the bringing in of the gay yelling faggot, his being tied on the griddle, the lateness of the priest and his cross and the silence again when the flames finally engulf the man. And all is seen through the eyes of a bun-vendor who does not say a word and roams behind everyone. And it is all calculated by the local bishop with the help of a consenting youth who plays the bait. And the mute witness is later revealed to be the devil enjoying the show set up for him by the good old Christian men and women. And there we start descending into a Flemish vision of Hell. And Hell is on earth with Charlie Chaplin arriving in the picture, accompanied by the traditional music of his mute films on a pipe, the cops, the cheating at the soup distribution, the cane and the bowler hat, the bored bride in a wedding, the monstrous father of the wimp bridegroom that gets creamed with the wedding cake, the strict family but the cheating mother who feeds bad Charlie in the back of the father, even a job shining, or should I say, polishing eggs, playing dice with what Dickens would have called street Arabs, and Shakespeare scoundrels I guess. And he introduces us in his dream of a bawdy paradise on earth, interrupted by two cops who arrest him and put him in a pillory. Add to that the flood. And the red widow strutting across this mess. In England religion has been turned into a business, a sham, a parody, a farce, a social carnival in which a windmill grinds corn without turning its wings, but it does not matter since the miller is a thief. But Chaucer in the film leads us to another inn-brothel of England. And an angel will take you to Hell and you better like devils and Satan and you will discover where all the friars are kept in Hell by Satan himself. You'll drown in a real colic of friars all over the world directly from under the tail of His Lord Satan. Amen for sure.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Pier Paolo Pasolini, to my estimation so far from films I've seen (which have been most of his oeuvre),wasn't a genius, at least not entirely. He could fall flat on his face or just stick his pretentious tail out too far into the wind. But he was an artist, and with his subjects he had something to say whether you liked it or not. So is the way with The Canterbury Tales, which I've been told is apart of a "trilogy of life" (along with the good Decameron and the near-masterpiece Arabian Nights),and like those films it's a narrative that is precisely loose and episodic, and the subject matter is like a Monty Python film that takes its craft seriously but still knows when to go in for the bizarre humor. Or sometimes not. Or sometimes it just doesn't work.

I never read the Chaucer Tales that are so renown to scholars and school-kids alike, but the stories in the film seem to reflect as much of its filmmaker as it does its author, if not more so. We get stories of lust and adultery and greed and ignorance in medieval, rural England. Not much time for a lot of the mythical aspects (though from time to time they are there),and there's a boatload of time for bawdy and crude comedy. One of the highlights is a scene where a young man has just finished sleeping with a woman (both very nude, it is NC-17 England and all),and the guy's friend is standing outside the window to get a kiss. She decides to give him one, her ass and a big fart right at his face. But he returns with a red hot poker and asks so nicely to get a kiss again, this time his friend's turn to give a fart, and thus get a red hot poker at his private area. So yeah, comedy like that.

Some scenes kind of meld into others, as the stories continue on with middle aged fat men who want their women and are joyful and mean in equal measure (one guy sings and amuses his woman, though she'd rather have the company of a younger man),while another man keeps trying to have his way with another maiden, a big phallus sticking right in his pants (again, NC-17). The downside to a lot of the film is that Pasolini, for all of his elegant artistry in composing shots in these rundown and rural places and in the fields of England (with DP Tonini Delli Colli),he can't really direct most of his cast well. Sometimes his use of non-professionals can work, but it doesn't help in this case that a large majority of the cast speak English, and are dubbed (Pasolini's films in general don't have live sound recorded),and some of the actors like the Fool who impresses with his capability of outrunning authorities and spilling eggs that don't break are just smiling idiots that can't act well.

That is, with some exceptions. Or rather, a bizarre exception. Tom Baker, who some of you may recall (or love) from his stint as a Doctor Who in the 1970's, appears in one of the stories. It's kind of a shock to even see him; he appears completely naked as a sexually frustrated housewife looks through a peephole, and he appears (we haven't seen his face until then) in a full 70's porno mustache and his usual wide-eyed demeanor. He also gets some other 'pleasure' in a field scene, which is also rather crazy to see, if only from the only former association with him being Doctor Who, and then another scene where he gets to overact reading from a book to the sexually frustrated housewife. It's a remarkably wild story and featuring the actor becomes more than just a curio. Ditto to the finale of the film, where we see Chaucer (who also appears during the film sometimes as the 'author' of these stories) delight in showing Satan and his minions defecating all over the place. It's like the South Park answer to Salo.

It's a film that is loaded with creative visuals, some striking Ennio Morricone music, and some really juvenile humor, not to mention the bad dubbing and hit-or-miss "acting" by the mostly non-professionals. But what carries it is the director's dedication to his vision, and the fun he's having with Chaucer and his own view on the decay and rampant sexual energy of the populous.

Uneven, with some mildly interesting stories and some pointless ones.

Based on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Pier Paulo Pasolini's adaptation doesn't do the book much justice. Many of the stories are plain dull and pointless. Some are interesting, but then end anti-climatically. (This is worse, in a way, as you get your hopes up of a decent story, and then it doesn't really go anywhere).

Quite similar to Pasolini's previous work, The Decameron, in many respects. Also doesn't have anything that ties the stories together (although The Decameron did at least have a summarising statement at the end, which was reasonably profound).

Performances here are better than the The Decameron, though there are some absolute shockers again. The lead character in the Chaplinesque scene involving the egg salesman takes the cake in terms of hammy acting.