Movie Review: The Little Hours: New at Reason

The Little Hours is fully stocked with smart, funny, attractive actors, and it doesn’t take long for you to start wondering what they’re doing in this slow-going comedy. The picture is set in 14^th Century Tuscany; its narrative is drawn from Bocaccio’s medieval story-telling classic The Decameron, and its laugh strategy is largely dependent on linguistic anachronism. The tone is set in an early encounter on the grounds of the convent in which most of the movie unfolds. A friendly gardener is passing by a pair of nuns. “Beautiful morning, sisters,” he says. “Get the fuck outta here!” one of the nuns responds.

Later, in another confrontation, this same nun, Sister Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza), berates the man further: “Why are you making eye contact with us, you fucking pervert?” Her companion, Sister Genevra (Kate Micucci), weighs in as well, castigating the man, for no reason, as “a piece of shit.”

These overamped insults, erupting out of nowhere, provoke puzzlement more than laughter. And later, at a castle not far away, when we hear a nobleman predicting that an impending invasion of hated Guelphs will soon have his family “eating chicken, like a bunch of fucking Croatians,” you might wonder whether this joke would have been funny even 700 years ago, writes Kurt Loder.

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