At this point, satirizing the sexual hypocrisy of the Catholic church is like shooting fish in a barrel, but at least Jeff Baena, writer and director of The Little Hours, does it with an antique firearm. Adapting two tales from the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century compendium of caustic stories, Baena steers a cast of familiar faces—John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Paul Reiser, Fred Armisen—through a period-dress but colloquially spoken farce about a cloister of lascivious nuns and their randy gardener. When the film works, it’s hilarious; when it doesn’t, it’s just another snarky indie comedy with too many Saturday Night Live alums. But Baena deserves credit just for dipping into the Decameron, which opened Italian literature to a more tolerant view of human impulse and, notably, to women characters who were forceful, self-aware, and possessed of their own strong desires.
Fernanda’s rage powers a story in which the convent begins to feel like a prison of the soul. Sister Alessandra (Alison Brie of AMC’s Mad Men) longs for a romantic relationship with a man, but her father (Reiser), a benefactor of the convent, keeps her cooped up there to avoid raising a dowry. “You’re stuck here with all these bitches, and so am I!” she exclaims to Massetto. Sister Genevra (Kate Micucci of Don’t Think Twice) compulsively rats out her fellow novices to the abbess, Sister Marea (Shannon), but in the course of the movie she discovers that she’s attracted to women (including Fernanda, who spends the night with her and then laughs off their encounter in the morning). All three women listen intently when Fernanda’s secular friend, Marta (Jemima Kirke), raves about the pleasures of being with a man. Soon afterward, Alessandra hikes up her skirt for Massetto in the orchard, and Marta and Fernanda steal into his hut one night for a forced threesome, Fernanda holding a knife to his throat.
Directed by Jeff Baena
