A CONVENT COMEDY WITH A MEDIEVAL HISTORY
Jeff Baena brings ancient Italian text up-to-date for modern viewers
It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you would accidentally acquire.
But when Jeff Baena was finished studying filmmaking at New York University, he realized he had also managed to earn a minor in medieval and Renaissance studies. In between classes in writing and directing, he had taken electives that covered such topics as Arabian Nights and Medieval Jewish Mysticism. He also took a course called Sexual Transgression in the Middle-Ages and Renaissance, which had students studying the sexual mores of the day through literature such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Those 14-Century novellas contained tales about seven young women and three young men who find refuge from the plague in a secluded villa. It also became an unlikely source for Baena’s third film The Little Hours, which opens the Calgary Underground Film Festival on Monday.
“I had never read the Decameron before and it was kind of amazing how timeless the stories were,” says Baena. “One story in particular I used as a backbone for the film, and took two other stories and used them as details. I had wanted to make this movie since I was in college. Sixteen or 17 years later, (filmmaker) Joe Swanberg was crashing at my place and we were talking and I told him this idea about a young gardener who pretends to be deaf and dumb and then all the nuns start seducing him. He thought that was so funny and said
‘ You’ve got to make that movie.’”
So Baena did, turning the Decameron into a very funny medieval sex comedy about a young man (David Franco) who pretends to be deaf and mute and is seduced by three nuns (Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza and Kate Micucci) in a 14th-Century Italian convent.
While the characters, particularly the nuns, speak in a modern vernacular that includes plenty of cursing and catty exchanges, Baena took pains to make the rest of the film historically accurate and faithful to the original source. Beyond the dialogue, this is not a zany comedy that winks at its historical inaccuracies.
“The thing about The Decameron that blew me away was just how easy it was to read and how funny it still is even though it’s 660 years later,” Baena says. “It’s still all there. The setups are hysterical. There are gags in there that I put in the movie that people are laughing at that I didn’t even come up with.”
It will likely come as a surprise that the period accuracy extends to the film’s raunchy tone and racy sex scenes, of which there are many. Back in those days, many girls or women who were in convents were there because they had no other options, Baena says. Some of those who entered as children were never married off for various reasons. In The Little Hours, this helps explain some of the social awkwardness of our three nuns, not to mention their frustration, anger and desire for various forms of, well, release.
“Sometimes they would just get stuck there and it was almost like a prison sentence for some of them,” says Baena, who will be joining Aubrey Plaza at the
screening of The Little Hours Monday at the Globe Cinema to open the Calgary Underground Film Festival. “The way they would react to that was to get wild. We read these things called the penitentials, which were all the punishments that would be levied at nuns and priests for the exploits they were doing. It was basically orgies and parties and crazy stuff and the hierarchy was set up so that everyone on the top would always have to take the flak for what was below them. So generally they would sweep stuff under the rug because no one wanted to look bad. So there was more corruption and craziness going on because no one wanted to look bad. It was just a wild and crazy time, a confluence of forces of being stuck in a position in life you weren’t happy with but also being resigned to it and just letting loose. It’s just a foreign thing for all of us and I thought it was an interesting setup.”
And an undeniably comedic one as well. Much of the dialogue is improvised by Baena’s dream cast, which also includes John C. Reilly as a kind but hard-drinking priest, Nick Offerman as a conspiracy-minded lord, Molly Shannon as the convent’s Mother Superior, Paul Reiser as Brie’s businessman father and Fred Armisen as an increasingly exasperated bishop. Baena began his career as a screenwriter, penning 2004’s I Heart Huckabees with David O. Russell. His first feature was 2014’s zombie comedy Life After Beth, which he followed up with 2016’s darkly comic Joshy. Much of the cast of the Little Hours, including Reilly, Brie, Reiser and Shannon have worked with Baena before. Plaza, who is Baena’s girlfriend, has appeared in all three of his films.
But while all bring a good deal of comedic muscle to the project, Baena says there are dark and serious undertones coursing beneath The Little Hours.
"I know there is comedy in it, but it wasn’t created to give life to the comedy. I think the comedy is giving life to the history and interior life that we have not been exposed to, especially as Americans,” he says. “I think a lot of Italians grow up reading the Decameron so this is not foreign to them. But for us, that sort of dynamic where you are subjugated on all levels because of the political and religious structure of the world, particularly with the gender inequality, all of that was factored into it.”
I had never read the Decameron before and it was kind of amazing how timeless the stories were.