It's 1348. The plague has brutally hit Florence. A group of then young people, seven women and three men, rebel against the feeling of death that is about to swallow them. They flee the city and find refuge in an abandoned villa in the Tuscan hills. Here, between moral doubts and the tasks needed to survive, they kill time by telling each other stories until they will decide to return. The stories are varied - tragic, bizarre, funny or erotic - but common and central to all of them is the female presence.
Reviews
Save your money for something good and enjoyable
a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
The Taviani brothers are fine directors —remember the great «Good morning, Babilonia» (1987) and recently the pseudo-documentary «Cesare deve morire», about the performance of Shakespeare's Julius Cesar play with Italian long term prisoners— but we have to assume that they are not very fluid in the art of narrating (and writing, in that case) their own stories, the cuts of the sequences are stiff, the editing is tough, plain, and also, at least in this case, the acting work of the performers are too theatrical, that makes this movie a little uncomfortable to see, as the interpreters (most of them too young, i'm afraid) were not moving in their natural environment or were not well directed... Ah, Pasolini Pasolini...! How we miss you...