The Little Hours

The Little Hours sees director Jeff Baena (writer of I Heart Huckabees) team up once again with Aubrey Plaza (Parks & Recreation) with a film that’s far superior to their debut collaboration, the tepid zombie comedy Life After Beth. The Little Hours takes place in 14th century Italy amid the idyllic Tuscan countryside, with cinematographer Quyen Tran capturing the vivid landscape around the isolated nunnery and grounds where most of the action takes place.

Based on the first tale of the third day of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, the opening credits in lurid 70s acid yellow also cite Pasolini’s infamous take on the tales, as well as 70s European sexpliotation, which often used sisters and their nunneries as erotic playgrounds for the sexually repressed.

The women of Baena and Plaza’s film, however, are arguably more oppressed than repressed, and the way in which they flout the rules of either Florentine courtliness or cloistering are varied and hilarious. The Little Hours is essentially a sex farce in which patriarchal leaders such as the bumbling Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) and the cuckolded Lord Bruno (played by a bowl-haircutted Nick Offerman in pitch-perfect Ron Swanson mode) are entirely unable to keep order of their women. The other significant male figure in the picture is guard-turned-farm hand Massetto (Dave Franco), who becomes the object of the desires of Lady Bruno, and subsequently the sisters.

The three young nuns on which The Little Hours centres are Sister Genevra (Kate Micucci), a gossipy tattletale; the playful, volatile Sister Fernanda, who dabbles in witchcraft (Plaza, like Offerman, hilariously riffs on her Parks & Rec character April Ludgate); and Sister Alessandra (Alison Brie of Glow, Community), who is desperately trying to cope with her cloistering while waiting for her father to amass a dowry so she can marry and be relatively free.

When Massetto crosses paths with a drunken Father Tommasso while fleeing from certain death at the hands of Lord Bruno’s men, the priest grants him sanctuary as a farmhand if he pretends to be a deaf mute. The sisters are volatile to strange men, the priest explains – earlier we see Genevra and Fernanda chase off a farmhand who dared to look and speak to them. “What the fuck are you looking at, pervert? Don’t fucking look at us!” they shout while pelting him with turnips in a riotously funny allusion to contemporary street harassment.

Through Massetto’s silent, unhearing pretence, the sisters ironically feel happier to confess their true frustrations and desires to him rather than Father Tommasso, leading to a kind of freedom in feminine sexuality and pleasure.