A work that is chronologically and aesthetically his mid-period film, Teorema is Pier Paolo Pasolini at his finest hour. It is not Neo Realist cousin like Accatone (1961) Mamma Roma (1962), nor is it the debaucherous snarl of Salò (1975); it has a larger portion of the religious parable than The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966), and is as interested in sex as The Decameron (1971).
The Canterbury Tales (1972) is the second film in Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” that began with Decameron (1971) and Arabian Nights (1974). Each film in the trilogy contains an enormous amount of sex, nudity, slapstick, and scatological jokes and are based on revered works of literature. Pasolini’s adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” contains eight of the 24 stories from the book. Each story effortlessly flows from one to the next and the whole is certainly greater than the sum of its part. Pasolini was a terrific director and his later period shows how he expanded his political cinema by incorporating the Academy’s literary canon. Adapting revered novels did not stop Pasolini from inserting radical subversions into the ideology of these texts.
“The Gospel According to Matthew” surely stands as one of the best films to undertake this sensitive subject. Indeed, it is simply one of the great works of world cinema.