The Little Hours

Why film a ribald Boccaccio romp now? There’s absolutely nothing at all even remotely like it in the multiplexes now. Everything today is Current or Special-Effect Future. So why not a little dabble in the historic. For a change. 

That’s reason one, and a hint at writer-director Jeff Baena’s willingness to take a risk. In the film biz, remember, sequels and rehashes are the sincerest form of flattery — not to mention the safest investment.  This film, though, is a unique riff on the medieval not a rip-off.

  It’s also an interesting experiment. Can you set a story in medieval Italy but keep the dialogue contemporary colloquial (e.g., one nun’s “Shut the f— up!”). Spoiler alert: yes, you can and it works with refreshing brio. 

After all, Boccaccio didn’t write in any archaic lingo but in his period’s colloquialism. That’s what Baena does here. The apparent anachronism is true to the original’s currency. Its the quote may suggest, it’s also great fun.

Which is another reason to revive Boccaccio today : to spring delightfulness upon the dour. 

In one plot line a handsome young servant escapes a sadistic lord’s revenge for sleeping with the lady of the house. In the other he pretends to be a deaf mute so he can secure work in a convent, where the ladies have vented their frustration by tormenting the male gardener. At the end three nuns rescue their man from the lord’s dungeon and return him to his manifold functions at the convent. 

The fired priest and the mother superior resume their enriched love as well. Amor vincit omnia. Love (secular, that is, really) conquers all. Especially the cold-hearted prigs. 

That bawdy folk-tale works as a corrective to the stolid religiosity of the Dark Ages. One fruit of the Renaissance was to recover humanity and the values of earthly existence, responsibility and pleasure from the repressive throttle of the medieval church. 

The archbishop here represents the period’s religious orthodoxy. So in his own service does the presiding priest. But the latter is distinguished by his humanity, his instinct to  forgive, and his capacity to love more fully than in the ethereal abstract. 

And that is what makes this medieval joke so bitingly current. Reviving a Renaissance ribaldry suggests we have yet again the need to fight off the Dark Ages. The monster is back so we need to revive its opponent. This hearty embrace of love and individual liberty implies today’s need to deflate an unsympathetic, repressive, non-compassionate religiosity. Of the latter, examples in the Trump presidency abound. This film summons Renaissance humanism to fight that monster again.