This film is a portmanteau film based on the famous 14th Century Italian story collection "The Decameron" by Giovanni Boccaccio. The book deals with ten people telling a story each every day for ten days, but Pier Paolo Pasolini (for obvious reasons) chooses merely nine stories for his film. Most of the stories deal with sex or deception (usually both).
Like all portmanteau films, some stories are better than others, but most of the stories in this film are so short that, if you don't enjoy one story, you don't have to wait long for the next one.
The film depicts a world filled with dirt and vulgarity but also full of life. Pasolini used a lot of ordinary people in his films and here we see many of the actors are not conventionally attractive (for example many have bad, or missing, teeth). Pasolini appears in the film as a pupil of the painter Giotto who is assigned to paint a mural on the wall of a church.
I found this film funny, charming and very entertaining. Definitely for adults though, there is quite a lot of sex and nudity on display here.
This was the first film in Pasolini's so-called "Trilogy of Life" and was followed by "The Canterbury Tales" and "The Arabian Nights".
