#7 in my ranking of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s filmography.
The final entry in Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life is more akin to The Canterbury Tales than The Decameron. Erotic but less concerned with shocking the squares than the first entry, Arabian Nights is another anthology film of ancient tales set in an exotic land, filmed beautifully by Pasolini and his cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini, that entertains lightly as it moves through its different stories with something of an overall framing device popping in every once in a while (it’s not the original story’s framing device). I think the looseness of the framing device here compared to the slightly more rigid use of it in The Canterbury Tales is why I prefer the second entry in the Trilogy over this third.
Nur-ed-Din (Franco Merli) gets talked into purchasing the slave Zumurrud (Ines Pellegrini) by her in the market, her giving him the money to do it. They run off to be together, spending a night of bliss where she tells him the first of the tales that describes a competition between Sium and a woman to find the most beautiful boy and the most beautiful girl in the world, keep them in a tent together, and determine which one is the most beautiful by watching to see which one falls in love with the other, the logic being the one who loves will be less beautiful than the one who does not. The irony of the story is that both fall in love and are, therefore, equally beautiful (this is all done while almost everyone is just…completely naked), and much like the Merchant’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, this provides a good example of the tone and approach to storytelling and the erotic that Pasolini has in store across the rest of the film.
It’s this approach to sex, interpersonal relationships, and a certain ancient magic that comes into play more fully in later stories (there’s no Aladdin here, though). It’s a yearning for a simpler time (ruled by tyrants, riddled with illiteracy, and without anything like modern medicine, but let’s just paper over that) where there was a deeper connection between people and the world around them, when they could see magic in things. It also shares that lighter tough in terms of the narrative that Pasolini demonstrated in the previous film, this quick definition of characters through good casting (almost all non-professional actors again), simple stories, and quick little points that makes fun short films.
The framing device that weaves through this film is tighter than what’s in The Canterbury Tales (The Decameron didn’t even try to have one) as Zumurrud gets kidnapped and finds her way into becoming king of a city (they think she’s a young man when she shows up) while Nur-ed-Din goes searching for her. How we move into and out of stories is never consistent and the blending between “reality” and fantasy is frequently fluid. The tales range from Prince Shahzaman (Alberto Argentino) facing off against a demon (Franco Citti) for the affections of a young girl (including actual special effects shots!) to Prince Yunan (Salvatore Sapienza) becoming shipwrecked on an island where he finds a boy destined to be murdered. However, the largest bulk of time is dedicated to the Aziz (Ninetto Davoli), his romantic pursuit of Budur (Luigina Rocchi), and Aziz’s cousin Aziza (Tessa Bouche) whom Aziz was due to marry before he became smitten.
This tale, staring the most frequent acting collaborator Pasolini had (for strong reasons since they lived together for a decade, a situation that had ended a little bit before, during the production of The Canterbury Tales, when Davoli had gone off to marry a woman), is an intricate telling of Aziz going through a series of impossible tasks that he usually fails at first before succeeding, leading to him getting closer to Budur over a series of nights. It’s an interesting tale with wrinkles about the nature of love contrasted with desire.
The tales weave in and out of each other until the framing device closes things out with an amusing resolution, and we’re done.
It’s not a deep film, but it’s got entertaining aspects and some interesting looks at sex and love and desire all in an exotic setting.
This Trilogy of Life was an amusing detour on Pasolini’s part. He would still consider them ideological, and I can see that in them. There are still matters of class and implications around life in the modern world that feed into his Marxist views. However, they’re much more background for the portraits of eroticism that he has on display. It’s not a surprise that his films, especially The Decameron, led to a rash of adult films, particularly in Italy, because they are so frank and open with their portraits of naked bodies. It was the first that felt the most like an attempt to “shock the squares”, but the next two were more fully just anthology films around their central ideas. I appreciated them more, and while I do think that the framing device of this film works better than the framing device in The Canterbury Tales, I think I prefer the second film in the trilogy overall because I simply got a bit more entertainment out of the stories told.
Still, it was light and amusing.
Rating: 3/4
David Vining, Author 
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