While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

"The complete truth is not in one dream, but in several." With this quote that Pasolini, one of the most idiosyncratic of all filmmakers, begins "Il Fiore delle mille e una notte." The strangeness and difficulty of his work Of his commitment to the contradiction: The basis of this commitment was the refusal to abandon the diverse and partly irreconcilable influences that determined the nature of his art: Catholicism, Marxism, homosexuality, urban favelas (scenarios of his early romances ), The peasantry, neo-realism, an attachment to the fantastic and miraculous.While "Il Fiore delle mille e una notte" seems to be so far removed from the proposals of neo- realism (in an attempt to capture the external and internal realities of the contemporary moment), the director still remains incredibly faithful to neo-realistic aesthetics : The use of non-professional actors, scenes filmed in external and real places (without the interference of artificial scenes or built specifically for the film), and the spontaneity of the game.Written (with the collaboration of Dacia Maraini) and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini "Il Fiore delle mille e una notte" (1974), it is the third and final chapter of the "Trilogy of Life" after "Decameron" (1971) and "I racconti di Canterbury" (1972). The greatness of the work of foreigners is noted, with scenes shot in: Yemen, Ethiopia, Iran, India and Nepal, and having a much more complex pre- project during the drafting of the script, undergoing major modifications during the assembly phase. The film was awarded in 1974 at the Cannes Film Festival, having achieved the Grand Prix."Il Fiore ..." is based mainly on a story that interacts with others, that is, they are mini stories or episodes, which in the end intertwine in a great fable of a dream world, being the protagonist of this story, the A young couple of lovers, "Nur-ed-Din" (Franco Merli), a cheerful and silly young woman and "Zumurrud" (Ines Pellegrini), a charming and very clever slave. From this couple that marks the initial and main story as a unifying thread, Pasolini tells, six other stories (organized into two groups of three) within a five-part structure.Each story trio has its own inner themes. The first three (brief anecdotes) are concerned with sexuality and equality, the third (more developed) ending in a tie and the demonstration that female desire and male desire are equally potent. The stories of the second trio are all concerned with the notions of Destiny: two stories in which fate is inescapable and included in a trajectory in which destiny is overcome. In addition, the story of Aziz, Aziza and Badur is in contradiction with the history of the picture of Nureddin and Zumurrud. They are linked by the contradiction that "faithfulness is beautiful, but no more than infidelity." In the tale of Aziz, conflict leads to death and castration, but in the main story, fidelity and infidelity are reconciled: Nureddin, in search of his beloved, can be led to innumerable delightful sexual amusements, but his allegiance to Zumurrud is Always triumphant over them, and finally rewarded in a happy ending that plays (in order to repudiate) sexual power relations.The recognition and celebration of diversity is an aspect of one of the central movements of Pasolini's work: the effort to rediscover a sense of the wonderful, the magical. Of all the films of Pasolini, "Il Fiore delle mille e una notte" stands out for perceiving the common sense of sexual relations, their pleasure and fun, and promotes this through an eroticism purged of all the contamination of pornography. Relationships that are established with sexual favors or in the end concretized by sex, much more than gratuitous or vulgar, present themselves as something human and common to all, without judgment of values, but for the pleasure of self-satisfaction.The script, although constructed on a very rigid structure and divided into three acts, each one of which, in its case, divided into four parts, with the strong presence of the structure as an element of connection and homogenization between the stories Chosen by Pasolini and based on the tales "Arabian Nights," in short, the same narrative material is instead presented in the film in a rhapsodic and continuous form. However, we can observe in several moments the remarkable presence of the author (script) and director, transmuted into speeches and defenses redundant to Pasolini, regarding political positioning, his homosexuality and obvious affirmation of faith and heresy.The work of camera movement is very curious, since Pasolini opted for the use of camera in hand (another clear reference to the neo-realism), which generates an intense movement, almost documentary and that associated with the beautiful photograph of Giuseppe Ruzzolini, Results in a great work and that knows to take advantage of the numerous and beautiful locations, having registered countries that throughout the history have closed by conflicts and wars. Ruzzolini also realizes a vivid photograph that does not differentiate what is reality from a dream, something that we can understand as an assumed position in not defining, giving the viewer freedom to understand everything as a great dream or story, and to make their own separations . Also worthy of mention is the work of Rank Film Labs, with simple special effects and practically handcrafted and that dialogue with the idea of ​​a story, of a story of fable, still permeated by criticism and political sense.Pasolini expresses through the cinema: beauty, love, truth and justice. Pasolini is essential because of its provocative, jocular and impudent nature in going to the bottom of controversial subjects and that society seeks to conceal, so little still, to accompany in a film. "Il Fiore delle mille e una notte" is a dazzle of images that allude to the dream of an imperfect world, but essentially human and therefore susceptible of errors that are assumed in the attempt of correct.

Rambling, pointless movie.Pier Paulo Pasolini's previous two movies, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, were collections of short stories. The stories were not connected and were mostly dull, anti-climatic and pointless.Arabian Nights sort of ends up that way too. The stories are longer, and there's less of them, but it's pretty much the same. The stories go nowhere and are even more absurd and perverse than before.Performances, as in The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, often leave a lot to be desired. Some are okay, but there are also some absolute shockers.

That the appalling disfigurement of this film should draw nothing but clichéd comments of 'poetic', 'mythical beauty' and 'lush', the last of which this film is so obviously not, that I am forced to wonder if this isn't a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. Surely, a man Sartre admired would not have made this tripe?Oh but what tripe it is. Poetic? Bergman is poetic; this is the sputtering realisation of a non-vision. Where is the grandeur? More often than not there is chaos, a shuffling, unfocused composition exacerbated by an unsophistication of dialogue worthy of ancient primates. I cannot believe anyone could find this film aesthetically pleasing, but I am willing to be corrected. The one shot of true beauty is on the DVD cover of the film. Grand it isn't.Subversive maybe? Of what? The fact that Arabian Nights is meant to be an ornate and gilded tale of beautiful people and beautifully woven moral tales. Take the beauty, wit and wisdom out of the characters and make them country bumpkins who grin like apes throughout the film and you have a subversive film, yes? Not to mention the 'bold' frontal nudity (mostly male) and gratuitous intercourse (neither art nor realistic but revolting and redundant); old men who bugger young boys for what joy, God alone knows; the shooting in Yemen, Iran and where-not and make it a slice of untouched Arabiana.No. That the director has forgone the sublime is obvious, but that he should forgo unity of design, is unforgivable and the results are obvious. What is the point of this deviant retelling? If I were a less confident being, I'd almost be worried that the constant, incessant and continuous (sic) giggling throughout the film were aimed at me. Most trying and exasperating film I have ever seen.

Pasolini is a wonderful, wonderful adventure. Welcoming him into your heart is not without cost; he's a friend who is brilliant on one side and captive to banality on the other.The bad? Well, its tolerable for me because it is so flamboyantly obvious. The man has a triple curse: he is outrageously gay, he is insufferably Italian and (perhaps because of these two) he has excessively simpleminded storytelling skills. The stories here in their individual content have juvenile dynamics. The way the emotions are handled is comically simpleminded.That's in the nature of the stories of course, but our man here takes them seriously, so overlain on this is his own sexual nature. These stories are, some of them, erotic in nature and all of them have desire as the driver. Among the various stories, he's chosen these and that's fine enough. The original stories were distributed in places all over the Islamic world, a huge reach, but all of them which included sex joked about the dissonance between Islmac attitudes towards sex and the actual lives of folks within.But its rather interesting actually watching how his own predilections enter the story. Most of the men here are slaves to their own desires. But those desires are all — in the stories — skipping over the most superficial of erotic notions. A teenage boy awakes and finds an unconscious teenage girl next to him. He has sex with her. This is equated to "falling in love." It happens over and over and if you encounter these stories in text, its part of the fun.But see how Pasolini himself enters the story in how he chooses to portray the erotic content. Nudity and youth stand for the erotic, especially the nude boy. When sex is depicted (less than you would expect from the stories) its amazing wooden, mannikins. I suppose if you made some still images of parts of this it would be erotic, but repeatedly seeing the male member of a cartoon tells me that director has the same foibles as the characters we see.The Good? Well there's more than enough of that to make up for the sexual inadequacies of that part of the world.There's the absolute beauty of the thing cinematically. It isn't fully cinematic in motion, since Pasolini has no notion of how things flow, what the rhythms of things are. But each shot is fulfilling and some are absolutely breathtaking. He doesn't have any static tableaux like the striking ones in "Matthew," but the visual elegance is erotic in itself. Its a sort of continuous penis shot of life, and you'll find the beauty of the places erotic in their own ways, And then there's the way the stories are crafted.Yes they are cartoonish. Yes, they have execrable pacing, almost as if they were found objects and put in inappropriate boxes. But the way they are tied one to another is nothing short of brilliant. If we had none of the beauty, and none of the amusement of watching an Italian fop struggle on screen, we'd still have this. And its great.There isn't any one mechanism that links the stories; there may be a dozen. There isn't any sense to about half of them, and that's part of the miracle. Sometimes they are inside one another, but sometimes they walk through each other. Sometimes it is the same place of extras. Sometimes a repeated situation; "don't eat from that plate." Sometimes it is simply a segue that has no narrative connection at all but just seems nested or siblinged in some way. Its "Sarogossa Manuscript" with fun and beauty.I must say that one story really is perfect. It alone has two really beautiful women acting erotically. It has expert pacing. It is funny: laugh out loud funny. And it has a punishment that is one of the most arresting images you'll see — if you are a guy. Plus it has a framing story that makes me think it was the first one adapted and filmed.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.