Sickened by empty left-wing sloganeering and by the way that hard-won sexual freedom was being commercially exploited, Pasolini's Decameron is an artistic rebellion. The first of Pasolini's colorful, entertaining and highly erotic Trilogy of Life films based on famous story cycles (to be followed by The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights, The Decameron contains ten stories based on the fourteenth century works of Giovanni Boccaccio. Capturing the bawdy, earthy spirit of the original, the film romps through its tales of sex and death - of lusty nuns and priests, cuckolded husbands, murdered lovers and grave-robbers, with five of the stories linked by an artist, 'Giotto's pupil', played by Pasolini himself. The beauty of the naked, youthful human body, of the sexual act in all its diversity, of the Italian landscape is undercut by the ugliness of social relations in which the rich, the church, artisans, exploit each other and the poor.