On the run with some fun nuns
Gentle comedy updates old ribald tale, comes off like an extended SNL skit
In the mid 14th century, the Italian scribe Giovanni Boccaccio crafted The Decameron, a series of 100 short stories allegedly told over 10 days by a group fleeing the Black Death. (Hey, write what you know.) One tale on the third day concerned a man who, to quote John Payne’s 1886 translation: “feigneth himself dumb and becometh a gardener to a convent of women, who all flock to lie with him.”
Ribald stuff, but clearly it needeth an update. Enter writerdirector Jeff Baena, who takes a shaker of comic actors and sprinkles them into the mix.
And so we have Dave Franco as Massetto, a servant who has been lying with his master’s wife (portrayed by Lauren Weedman) and lying to his master (Nick Offerman) about it.
Massetto flees, and runs into Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly), who suggests he take up hiding in a nearby nunnery that has recently lost its gardener. But this puts him in the way of sisters Alessandra (Alison Brie),
Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza), Marta (Jemima Kirke) and others, all hot under the habit, or “sensible of their feminine appetites,” quoth Payne.
It’s slight, silly fun, in the manner of an extended Saturday Night Live sketch, and Baena gets a lot of mileage out of the whole nuns-behaving-badly shtick.
And while the setting looks to be mid-second millennium (I’d hate to be more specific) the language is modern, with all the robust swearing that implies. Sometimes the vocabulary gets deliciously twisted, as when one nun accuses another: “She is on drugs. She told me she took belladonna tonight, and she has been dancing around in the woods with witches.”
I’d like to think that Boccaccio would approve.