ARABIAN NIGHTS Movie Review

Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte
Flower of the Arabian Nights
A Thousand and One Nights

In the last years of his career and his life, Pier Paolo Pasolini turned to an unexpected source for inspiration: cinematic interpretations of literary classics, including Medea (1970), The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and this colorful but oddly disjointed 1974 telling of the Arabian Nights. Some of the narrative lapses may be due to cuts that the film suffered at the hands of censors who dogged Pasolini through his entire career. Still, much of the insistent eroticism that permeated his versions of Oedipus Rex (1967) and The Decameron had become largely an uninspired, rote exercise by the time of this film, Pasolini's second-to-last prior to his scandalous Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom and his subsequent murder. Be that as it may, the film's relaxed mood, open structure, and occasional flashes of deep humor, most of which relate to sexual stereotyping and the nature of truth, now seem precious and fragile reminders of the gifted and often humane director who would present us next with his horrifying parting shot, Salo—perhaps the most utterly bleak and despairing vision of the human condition that the cinema has yet given us.

NEXT STOP … The Decameron, Fellini Satyricon, The Milky Way

1974 130m/C IT Ninetto Davoli, Franco Merli, Ines Pellegrini, Luigina Rocchi, Franco Citti; D: Pier Paolo Pasolini; W: Pier Paolo Pasolini; C: Giuseppe Ruzzolini; M: Ennio Morricone. VHS, LV, Letterbox WBF