One of the masterpieces of Renaissance Italian literature, Boccaccio’s The Decameron is an ars narrativa. It offers any adapter or screenwriter an overabundance of source materials—a fact that seems to have escaped those responsible for this eight-part Netflix Summer 2024 series. In the series’ fourteenth-century source, ten nobles—seven women and three men—fleeing plague-ridden Florence, seek shelter in a villa in Fiesole where, over the course of two weeks, they tell 100 tales to pass the time and amuse and enlighten themselves. Both immensely popular and immensely controversial in its own day, the Decameron has had a remarkable afterlife. From the start, the Catholic Church took a dim view of the work—too many tales with priapic priests, fornicating friars, and nymphomaniac nuns—not to mention lascivious lay people and sexually exploited servants. The Decameron was supposedly among the titles burned in Savonarola’s (in)famous “bonfire of vanities.” It ended up on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum several times, even after some judicious ecclesiastical editing that replaced the less-than-chaste clergy with additional lascivious lay people.
Outside ecclesiastical circles, The Decameron has remained immensely influential. Chaucer borrowed from it, as did Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Middleton, Martin Luther, Molière, Swift, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson—the list goes on and on. The story of patient Griselda has proven especially intriguing, adapted by Chaucer (perhaps by way of Petrarch), Lope de Vega, Apostolo Zeno in an early eighteenth-century opera with multiple scores, and, most recently, Caryl Churchill in her 1982 play Top Girls. Translations of The Decameron in part or whole into English began in the sixteenth century. More encompassing adaptations include Marguerite de Navarre's sixteenth-century Heptaméron and, most recently and perhaps not surprisingly, multiple literary anthologies commissioned in response to the shutdowns occasioned by the ongoing COVID pandemic, such as those sponsored by the State Theatre of Australia, The New York Times Magazine, and the San Diego Decameron Project.
With mixed results, filmmakers have embraced The Decameron. Two Hollywood ventures, (one in 1924 and one in 1953) entitled Decameron Nights, were based on tales by Boccaccio, who in the latter was played by Louis Jourdan. Pasolini’s 1971 The Decameron, with the director playing Boccaccio, presents nine tales and a rather intriguing complex critical reading of its source. Two romantic comedies, Virgin Territory (2007) and The Little Hours (2017) nod to Boccaccio’s work, while the 2015 film Wondrous Bocaccio is loosely based on four tales from The Decameron.
All of which brings us to Netflix’s eight-episode series The Decameron, billed as the “comic sexual romp” of the summer—except that it isn’t very funny, it has too little sex, and it is even more lacking in “romp.”
The basic plot is there. Nobles, sometimes with servants in tow, flee plague-ridden Florence and other towns in Tuscany for the Villa Santa, each with more of an agenda than simply escaping death. The villa itself is a prize to be won by marriage or inheritance or force. None of the characters is at all sympathetic. They are all caricatures.
Pampinea (Zosia Mamet) is a spoiled harpy intent on marrying her cousin, the always absent Visconte Leonardo, who owns the villa. The Visconte, it turns out, is absent for a good reason: he has already died from the plague before episode one even begins—a fact not known to any of his guests until much later in the series. Accompanying Pampinea is her doormat of a servant Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), who spends the whole series looking for validation and love in all the wrong places. Rivaling Pampinea as the series’ most annoying character—though, truth be told, all the series’ characters are annoying in their own ways—is Filomena (Jessica Plummer), whose servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds) at least has a bit more spine than Misia, and who for a while passes herself off as her mistress who finds herself in turn mistaken for her servant. That the Netflix series is more interested in the dynamics between servants and masters than in Boccaccio is less than subtly signaled when, early in episode one, the soundtrack of appropriately period music abruptly switches to Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.”
Also in residence at Villa Santa is Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), a wealthy hypochondriac, who has arrived with his quack of a personal physician Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) in tow. Rounding out the guest list is Panfilo (Karan Gill), another of the Visconte’s cousins who is down on his luck and, therefore, keen to lay claim to the villa, and his, at least initially, overly pious wife Neifile (Lou Gala). Presiding over this whole circus is Sirisco (Tony Hale), literally the series’ magister ludi, who is steward of Villa Santa, and who is sometimes assisted, and sometimes thwarted, by the villa’s cook Stratilia (Leila Farzad), who has her own claim to the villa through her son, Jacapo (Aston Wray), who was fathered by the Visconte.
Each episode is basically comprised of internecine scheming among the principals—all of whom want to lay claim to the villa, or attempt to assist others to do so. Sometimes someone will briefly leave the villa, only to return none the nicer or the wiser than when they left. Sometimes outsiders—including the bandit Ruggerio (Fares Fares), who is, of course, yet another of the Visconte’s cousins, and a Savonarola-like friar and his band of brigands—will show up and join the original guests. Too often, the safe haven proves anything but safe, as plague also becomes an unwelcome guest and takes its toll on the assemblage. From episode to episode, the plot thickens, but, in doing so, the plot of the series also moves farther and farther away from Boccaccio. Given all their running around, the characters haven’t a moment to spare to tell a tale. Instead, the series turns Boccaccio’s work into a period costume soap opera. Only in the last minutes of the final episode do viewers bump into Boccaccio. The surviving principals flee the plague-infested villa—now under the control of the friar and his brigands—and settle into an unidentified pastoral retreat. As they sit in a circle on the ground, Sirisco proposes to tell a tale. Knowing viewers will recognize that the tale, which he only begins to tell before the final credits roll, is that of Griselda, whose legendary patience viewers might more than emulate and still never see much from Boccaccio in this summer’s Netflix (more than very loose) adaptation of The Decameron.
The Decameron, created, adapted and produced by Kathleen Jordan, for Netflix; eight episodes, loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century work, The Decameron; available for streaming on Netflix as of 25 July 2024.
