Netflix’s ‘Decameron’ Is a Lot of Irreverent Fun: TV Review

IIn the annus horribilis of 2020, as COVID-19 ravaged the world, a generation that had not yet experienced a cataclysm of precisely this nature and scale turned to art for insights into how we might survive it. Contemporary speculative fiction about lethal pathogens, from the novel by Ling Ma Separation to the Steven Soderbergh film Contagion, grew in popularity. Readers also turned to stories of past pestilences: Daniel Defoe A Diary of the Plague YearGabriel García Márquez Love in Times of Cholera. But no dusty book received a greater boost than Giovanni Boccaccio’s early Renaissance classic. O Decameron. Virtual book clubs emerged to dissect it. To New York Times commissioned stories from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Tommy Orange for its own update, The Decameron Project. “Six centuries later, The Decameron Suddenly it’s the book of the moment”, reported that self-proclaimed arbiter of relevance, Vogue.

Set amid the Black Death that decimated Europe in the mid-14th century, Boccaccio’s masterpiece follows 10 young nobles fleeing an outbreak of plague in Florence that would ultimately reduce the city’s population by half. To pass the time in their rural idyll, they tell the stories that make up the majority of the book – one for each of them over 10 days, hence the title. The consensual interpretation of The Decameron has long illustrated the unique power of storytelling to propel humanity through history’s most devastating moments. Author Rivka Galchen summarizes this reading in her introduction for The Decameron Project: “Reading stories in difficult times is a way of understanding those times and also of persevering through them.”

Kathleen Jordan, the creator of Netflix The Decameron, came away from his pandemic-era reading of Boccaccio with a very different understanding. What if, his black comedy proposes, the book’s true timeless message is that, whether they are Florentine aristocrats in 1348 or Manhattan financiers in 2020, the privileged will always happily abandon their less fortunate neighbors when plague comes to town? Jordan undressed O Decameron of their stories, opting instead to riff on the painting’s narrative. Somehow, his irreverence pays off. As successful as it is on its own terms, the series raises the question of what derivative works, devoured by platforms eager to capitalize on intellectual property trends (especially if they predate the advent of copyright law), deserve to be called of adaptations.

The Decameron without stories looks as promising as The hell No circles of hell, but if anyone can create an impossible premise, it’s Jordan and fellow executive producer Jenji Kohan. With Orange is the new black, Kohan turned a white, middle-class writer’s prison memoir into a dark but vibrant dramedy about prison injustice, starring Black and brown women disproportionately caught up in that system. Jordan and Kohan’s Frustratingly Short Lives Teenage Bounty Hunters proved that, when executed with enough warmth and intelligence, even the stupidest-sounding concept can make a wonderful show.

The same audacious humor permeates The Decameron. Like the original, the series begins in the corpse-strewn desert of 1348 Florence, as a handful of nobles and their servants prepare to flee the city to wait out the plague in a luxurious country villa. The characters share names with Boccaccio’s brigade, but little else. Zosia Mamet and Derry Girls star Saoirse-Monica Jackson is a perfect match as Pampinea, a bossy 28-year-old so desperate to get married that she accepted an unseen proposal from the villa owner and his strangely loyal maid, Misia. Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), a pompous hypochondriac who has just inherited his family’s fortune, arrives with his handsome doctor, Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) in tow. Cunning Panfilo (Karan Gill) and pious Neifile (Lou Gala) are the married lovebirds, but neither of them can stop looking at Dioneo. Then there are the bratty Filomena (Jessica Plummer) and her long-suffering servant Licisca (Sex education featured Tanya Reynolds), whose lover makes her leave Filomena’s own father’s deathbed claiming that he is already dead.

Upon arriving at the villa, the group finds their host absent, but their complacent butler (the great Tony Hale) and the surly, noble-hating cook (Leila Farzad, a highlight of the second half of the season) are at their service. It doesn’t matter; The rich kids are determined to have a fun vacation, even as the plague destroys the fabric of civilization. “We are here to eat and drink and move towards a new and bright future”, announces the delirious Pampinea – who, as the ostensible future owner of the mansion, eagerly and somewhat dictatorially assumes the role of hostess.

That’s precisely what they do for a while, drinking wine and indulging in the kind of innocently illicit sexual adventures about which Boccaccio’s virtuous characters only told tall tales. (Like most streaming series, The DecameronThe episodes and season are a little longer than necessary.) While their employees work to satisfy their bosses’ absurd whims, the nobles seize the moment of social change as an opportunity for self-discovery. “If the plague taught us anything,” says a character trying to bring Pamphilus out of the closet, “it’s that we must choose the parts of ourselves we want to keep and the parts we want to throw away.”

It’s a great philosophy if you’re confident you’ll survive. But as viewers who have lived through the past four years already know, the assumption that wealth and seclusion alone are infallible defenses against a pandemic attacking society from every angle is hopelessly naive. In truth, the village has never been a safe haven, and its gates are useless not only against the infected, but also against the marauding mobs it has empowered. A thrill from Jordan’s lively, earthy, and hilarious life Decameron is watching the pampered discover that, to the filthy horde surrounding their oasis, they are the spoils.

The show is really The Decameron, however? To be fair, it would be virtually impossible to fully adapt the 860-page, 100-story volume. When admirers borrow from him, as Shakespeare did from All’s well that ends well and just a few years ago, filmmaker Jeff Baena made The little hours, usually only appropriate a story for two. English translations of the book have often been quite abridged, while even relatively faithful adaptations such as the 1971 film by Italian author Pier Paolo Pasolini The Decameron portray only a small selection of his short stories. Still, there’s something about the idea of ​​taking Boccaccio’s title but leaving his stories behind that doesn’t feel right.

Hollywood’s eagerness to attach a familiar, if undeserved, title to every project is a red flag. However, Jordan has a solid justification for his approach. Although the brief stories didn’t seem right for TV, she said she “loved the armor and the skeleton” around them, “this idea of ​​a group of rich people who think they can escape a pandemic.” It is through this COVID-informed interpretation that she accesses the soul of Boccaccio’s work. Her Decameron it does not simply refer to the famous story in which an adulterer hides in a barrel from his lover’s husband; it also captures the author’s bawdy sense of humor, his contempt for a corrupt Church, the glee with which his characters plot and transgress, his prescient insight into the potential of a pandemic to remake society.

It is not fidelity to the lyrics, or even the basic structure, of the source material that makes a worthy adaptation. What matters most is that the retelling embodies the spirit of the work that inspired it. At best, among which I would certainly include Netflix’s Decameron, also challenges the received wisdom about this work. As Licisca, the show’s most insightful character, observes, just as the villa begins to descend into chaos: “Independence is the greatest luxury.” His revelation applies as much to a 21st-century TV creator adapting classic literature as it does to a servant fleeing her tyrannical mistress as the plague consumes her town.