SNAPSHOT
The film stars Franco as a servant in the Middle Ages who flees the clutches of his oppressive master (Nick Offerman), ultimately taking up residence with a convent of wild nuns (Plaza, Shannon, Brie, Micucci) in the campy interpretation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century work The Decameron (synopsis via Entertainment Weekly)
The Catholic League may have described The Little Hours as “pure trash” but a lot of other people seem to like a lot.
Take Variety for instance.
“What for American satirist Jeff Baena (Life After Beth, Joshy) must have felt like a radically innovative idea — take a medieval piece of literature, such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, and recreate it with an irreverent modern sensibility — is in fact a strategy that Euro auteurs have been doing for decades. Not that a somewhat overinflated sense of novelty makes Baena’s twisted nuns-gone-wild comedy The Little Hours any less entertaining …
“The Little Hours is, then, a medieval convent comedy for the megaplex crowd, one that dispenses with the notion of nuns as prim-and-proper old maids who spend their days praying, and instead treats them as rude-and-repressed young women with raging hormones and a curiosity about all things forbidden.”
“Relieved of the burden of creating a fully convincing Middle Ages, the pic can focus on laughs. Franco makes a sympathetically bewildered sex object here, eagerly accepting some of the unexpected action coming his way while panicking at other, weirder advances. (Some of these nuns dabble in love drugs and witchcraft; one is even secretly — gasp — a Jew.) A comedy in both the current and the original senses of the word, Little Hours earns its laughs before ensuring a happy end. Sure, the increasingly agitated plot eventually exposes all sins and gets nearly everyone condemned by a visiting bishop (Fred Armisen). But a bit of cloister-inspired ingenuity fixes that, leading to an end in which all but the vengeful and the judgmental find happiness, or at least a new shot at it.”
Yes it may be irreverent and more than a little silly but that’s not such a bad thing and can be a powerful antidote to take ourselves way too seriously.
The Little Hours opens in USA on 30 June.
