Arabian Nights (1974 film)  

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Arabian Nights (1974) is an Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Its original Italian title is Il fiore delle Mille e una notte, which means "The Flower of the One Thousand and One Nights".

The film is an adaptation of the ancient Arabic anthology The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, better known as The Arabian Nights. It is the last of Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life", which began with The Decameron and continued with The Canterbury Tales.

The best known still from the film is a lateral depiction of a nude man and woman facing each other. The woman sits, legs apart; the man kneels in front of her and points a bow to her genital area. The tip of the arrow has a phallus attached.

Plot

The main story concerns an innocent young man, Nur-e-Din (Franco Merli), who comes to fall in love with a beautiful slave girl, Zumurrud (Ines Pellegrini), who selected him as her master. After a foolish error of his causes her to be abducted, he travels in search of her. Meanwhile, Zumurrud manages to escape and, disguised as a man, comes to a far-away kingdom where she becomes king. Various other travellers recount their own tragic and romantic experiences, including a young man who becomes enraptured by a mysterious woman on his wedding day, and the prince Shazaman (Alberto Argentino), who wants to free a woman from a demon (Franco Citti) and for whom two women sacrifice their lives. Interwoven are Nur-e-Din's continuing search for Zumurrud and his (mostly erotic) adventures. In the end, he arrives at the far-away kingdom and is reunited with Zumurrud.

The film comprises 16 scenes, all featuring abundant nudity, sex, and slapstick humor.

Truth lies not in one dream, but in many dreams. - verse from the 1001 Nights and opening title

• Lady of the Moons: The slave girl Zumurrud is being sold in the marketplace. Her present owner allowed her to choose her new master. Man after man offers to buy her but she refuses. An older man offers to buy her but she laughs and insults his erectile dysfunction. She spots the youth Nur-ed-Din and promises to be his slave. They go back to Nur-ed-Din's home and make love.
• Zumurrud's story: Zumurrud tells her first story-within-the-story about the bisexual poet Sium from Ethiopia of the royal court. This segment is based on the poetry of Abu Nuwas. The king spots a woman bathing naked and is sad he has to leave. He asks Sium to compose a poem on the spot about the experience. Afterwards, Sium goes into the town where he propositions three boys for sex. Later, the king and the woman he saw bathing earlier find two youths, a boy and a girl, and drug them with potions. They leave them asleep naked in the same tent on separate cots. They make a bet that whichever of the pair falls in love is the inferior one, as the weaker falls in love with the beautiful. In turn, they wake both the boy and the girl, and both attempt to masturbate on the other's naked body. In the end, Sium and the woman admit there is no clear winner and they leave. Zumurrud is finished with her story and has completed a tapestry. She tells Nur-ed-Din to sell it in the market to anyone except a blue-eyed European man. Nur-ed-Din goes to the market and falls for the blue-eyed man's high offer. The man follows Nur-ed-Din back to his home and asks to share food. He drugs Nur-ed-Din with a banana and steals Zumurrud when he is asleep. The blue-eyed man brings Zumurrud to the old man from the marketplace, and he beats her for having mocked him.
• Nur-e-din's search: Nur-ed-Din is very distressed when he awakens. A female stranger offers to help him. She discovers where Zumurrud is and tells Nur-e-din to wait outside the old man's gate when he is asleep. Zumurrud will jump over the wall and abscond with him. He waits deep into the night but falls asleep. A passing Kurd steals his money and his turban. Zumurrud jumps over the wall and mistakes the Kurd for Nur-ed-Din. The Kurd brings her back to his hideout, where he says his friends will gang rape her. She is chained up but manages to escape the next day and leaves into the desert disguised as a soldier.
• Crowned King: Zumurrud rides through the desert and arrives outside a city guarded by several soldiers and a crowd of people. She claims to be a soldier named Wardan. The people, believing her to be a man, tell her that after the king passes without an heir, their tradition is to crown the first traveller who comes to their city. She is also given a bride. On her wedding night, Zumurrud reveals her secret to the bride. The bride promises to keep her secret. The European man and the Kurd travel to the city and are summarily executed on WardanTemplate:'s orders. The people they were eating with mistakenly believe this is punishment for stealing a handful of their rice.
• Dream: This segment is based on the story of the Porter and the three ladies of Baghdad from Night 9. Nur-ed-Din is mistaken for a porter by a veiled woman. She hires him to collect various foods and dishes from the market to bring home for her and her two sisters. They return home, set the table and begin reading. In the story-within-the-story, Princess Dunya dreams about a female dove helping her male counterpart fly free from a net. The female is then caught in a net and the male flies off alone. She takes the meaning of this dream as the infidelity of men and vows to never marry.
• Aziz and Aziza: Dunya picks up a book and reads a story. The next story is based on the Aziz and Aziza story that begins on Night 112. Aziz (Ninetto Davoli) is telling his friend, Prince Tagi, about his life. He was set to be married to his cousin Aziza, but on the wedding day, he is distracted by a mysterious woman he meets by chance, when he sits under her window. The woman communicates to him in scant gestures. He is smitten with this woman and goes to Aziza to figure out what to do. Aziza helps decode the messages and tells him how to reply and what poetry to recite. After a rough start, the woman responds to Aziz who looks forward to their meeting in a tent outside the city.
• Love is my Master: Aziz goes to the tent and drinks some wine which puts him to sleep. The woman leaves a sign that she will murder him if he does something so careless again. He goes back and abstains from eating this time. The woman (named Budur) comes and they make love. Aziz recites the poetry Aziza told him to. He returns home and Aziza is on the roof, crushed with loneliness, but Aziz does not seem to care. He only wants Budur. Aziza gives him more poetry to recite. Aziz returns to Budur and after they sleep together, he shoots an arrow with a dildo into her vagina in a highly symbolic scene. Aziz goes home to rest while Aziza cries again. Aziz goes to Budur the next day and recites more poetry but she scolds him. She says the meaning of the poem is that the girl who gave it loved him and has committed suicide. She tells him to go to her grave. He goes and his mother tells him to mourn faithfully but he clearly has little interest in this.
• Weep as you made her weep: Aziz returns to Budur the next day but she is very distraught. She gives him a large sum of money and tells him to erect a monument in Aziza's honor, but he spends all the money on alcohol. After leaving the bar, he is kidnapped by a young woman and her hired thugs. The woman orders him to marry her or Budur, whom he was visiting will kill him. He spends a year with her and fathers a child but he leaves one day on the pretext of visiting his mother. He instead goes to see Budur, who is sitting outside her tent. He asks why she is sitting alone. She responds she has sat alone for one year, not moving an inch, waiting for him. When Aziz tells her he is married and has a child now, Budur tells him he is useless to her now. However, she calls some other women and they surround him with knives. He yells out the last poem Aziza gave him and they are forced to halt. Budur says she won't kill him and that Aziza has saved him this time but that he will not leave unharmed. She ties a rope around his genitalia and castrates him. Aziz returns to his mother who gives him a message from the deceased Aziza. A tapestry he believed was made by Budur was actually made by a woman named Princess Dunya. Prince Tagi hears all this and is moved. He wants to meet Dunya as he has fallen in love with her without even meeting her.
• Garden: The two travel to Dunya's city where she has walled herself off in her palace. They ask the gardener for a tour and he obliges. He says Dunya had a dream about a dove that was betrayed by her male counterpart and has vowed to have nothing to do with men. The two want to meet her under the guise of posing as painters. They plan on hiring two other painters to help them with this disguise. The two are offered seven, eight and even 9 dinars but they refuse to work for anything below one dinar.
• The Painter's story: The men are all painting and working in the palace. Aziz's friend asks the first one what his story is and he replies that he was once a prince who managed to survive a battle by covering himself in a corpse's blood and pretending to be one of the dead. After the enemy leaves, he runs off to a new city to hide. He asks for work and says he knows a lot about philosophy, science, astronomy, medicine and law. The man tells him this is useless to him and the prince will work cutting wood.
• Prince Shahzaman: This is an adaptation of the second dervish's tale from Nights 12 and 13. Prince Shahzaman and his entourage are attacked by robbers. He plays dead and thus survives the attack. Shahzaman goes out to cut wood and accidentally finds a trap door in the ground. He walks down the stairs and finds a beautiful girl trapped underground by a jinn. She tells him that the jinn only comes once every ten days or when she slaps the golden sign above her bed that tells him that she needs him. The prince sleeps with her and he proudly holds his erection in his hand as he announces that he will free her from the jinn. Against her wishes, he hits the golden sign in order to kill the jinn. The prince immediately regrets this and leaves without his shoes before the jinn arrives. The girl tries to explain things to the jinn, that it was only an accident but the jinn realizes she was sleeping with someone when he spies the prince's shoes. He goes out searching for the prince by asking people if they know who the shoes belong to and someone replies yes much to the jinn's happiness. The jinn takes the prince back to the cave and attempts to make the prince kill the girl with a sword but the prince is afraid to do it, having just slept with the girl He also asks the girl to kill the prince but she refuses. Angered and realizing neither will do it, the jinn then chops the girl into pieces himself and takes the prince away to exact his revenge. The jinn tells him that he will not kill him but will transform him into a monkey as punishment for what he has done. The monkey then is picked up by travellers on a ship though it is unknown to them that he was once a man. The travellers are amazed when the monkey takes a paper and brush from them and writes down poetry in beautiful calligraphy. The travellers land at port and go to the king with the paper. The king asks to find whoever wrote such beautiful poetry and throw him a celebration. The people throw a celebration for the monkey. The monkey is adorned with robes and is carried on a litter to the king's surprise. The king's daughter who is knowledgeable of sorcery understands that he was once a man and transforms him back, killing herself in the process. She goes up in flames and only ashes remain of her. Her father, who allowed her to commit suicide, now wants to give the prince a rich gift. But Prince Shahzaman thanks the king for his daughter's self-sacrifice and says he now wants to return to his kingdom.
• Yunan's story: This is an adaptation of the third dervish's story from Nights 14 and 15. In far east Asia, Prince Yunan lives in contentment with his father, the King. Yunan decides to go on a voyage to islands within his kingdom but the ship is blown off course in a storm. He asks the crew why they are crying and they tell him there is an island with a "magnetic mountain" that they are approaching. It will pull all the nails out of their ship and send them to their deaths among the rocks. The ship crashes as they explain but Yunan survives. He hears a voice telling him to grab a bow and arrow buried under the sand and shoot the stone knight statue bearing the cursed talisman that is planted on the peak of the island. He shoots it as he is told and the entire island collapses into the sea. Yunan survives though and drifts among the waves with a piece of wood from his destroyed ship.
• Chamber in the sand: Yunan drifts to another island where he sees a ship disembarking. He runs but it is too late. He finds a chamber on the island and goes inside to find a young boy. The young boy tells him that he is the son of a king and it was foretold by a soothsayer that on that very day he would be killed by a prince named Yunan and so his father took him to the remote island and built a chamber to keep him in until the dangerous time passed. Yunan hears this and tells him he will not hurt him but will only protect him. They bathe together and then go to sleep but during his sleep, Yunan begins sleepwalking and grabs a knife. He stabs the boy with the knife, killing him. The ending of this story is changed from in the book where the prince accidentally kills the boy while trying to cut a lemon.
• Dream revealed: This segment is based on the porter's story in Night 9. Nur-ed-Din is bathing naked with the three sisters, who are also naked. They are a bit drunk and messing around with each other. One by one, the women ask Nur-ed-Din what their vaginas are called. He answers but they keep telling him he's got the wrong names. The right names are meadowed grass, sweet pomegranates, and the Inn of Good Food. He then asks them what the name of his penis is and each provides an answer though he says they are incorrect. Its name is "the donkey which grazes perfumed meadowed grass, eats peeled sweet pomegranates and spends the night in the Inn of Good Food". He then wakes up the next morning in the terrace outside the women's house. He continues on his search for Zummurrud.
• Nur-e-din and Zumurrud: Nur-ed-Din reaches the city where Zummurrud rules. He grabs a handful of rice from the bowl where people are eating and is taken away to the king's private chamber. Zummurrud (still in disguise) asks him for anal intercourse. He meekly accepts and pulls down his pants. She pulls off her disguise and reveals it was only a joke. They are reunited and they embrace.

Crew

Producer: Alberto Grimaldi
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Written by: Dacia Maraini, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Original Music: Ennio Morricone
Cinematographer: Giuseppe Ruzzolini

Cast

Franco Merli, Ines Pellegrini, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti, Tessa Bouche, Margaret Clementi, Francelise Noel, Ali Abdulla, Christian Aligny, Jeanne Gauffin Mathieu, Francesco Paolo Governale, Salvatore Sapienza, Zeudi Biasolo, Barbara Grandi, Elisabetta Genovese, Gioacchino Castellini, Abadit Ghidei, Mohamed Ali Zedi, Salvatore Verdetti, Jocelyne Munchenbach, Luigina Rocchi, Alberto Argentino, Luigi Antonio Guerra, Franca Sciutto