‘The Decameron’ Gives Sex, Class, and the Plague a Contemporary Spin

When it comes to satire, a handful of topics are evergreen: sex, politics, and making fun of rich people. The 14th-century Italian story collection The Decameron is no exception, and neither is the 21st-century Netflix series very loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s plague-era masterpiece. Our own plague era may or may not be over, depending on who you ask. But the wealth gap just keeps getting bigger, and mocking out-of-touch elites who feast and frolic while the masses suffer will, sadly, not become irrelevant any time soon.

And the sex? Both versions of The Decameron delight in bedroom romps, although Kathleen Jordan’s take on the material is more invested in the relationships between its characters than Boccaccio’s. Rather than using a gaggle of nobles hiding out in a lavish villa as the Black Death burns through the countryside as a framing device, Netflix’s Decameron stays with 10 core characters—give or take a few peasants and mercenaries—throughout its eight-episode run. This ends up becoming a liability, as the series assumes that if we spend enough time with these rotten people, we’ll grow to love them. The assumption is incorrect.

The series starts off appealingly morbid, the camera following a cart piled with dead bodies over the cobblestone streets of Firenzia (a.k.a. Florence, Italy). Just before it’s dumped into a river, a peasant pulls a pair of boots off of a corpse, ecstatic about their quality. It’s dark and silly in a Monty Python and the Holy Grail type of way, a comedic note The Decameron will return to throughout the series. This glib attitude toward death and violence combine with vicious wit, soap-opera lust, unhinged slapstick, Shakespearean mistaken identities, and misjudged sentimentality as the series wears on.

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