8. Arabian Nights (1974)
Part of Pasolini's 'Trilogy of Life' along with The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, which were also rated NC-17, Arabian Nights is a bawdy and earthy film romp with plenty of frank sexual encounters. The basic film concerns Nur-e-Din, an innocent young man who falls in love with a slave girl called Zumurrud who is abducted by accident after she chooses Nur-e-Din as her master. Zumurrud manages to escape and disguises herself as a man. She enters a mysterious land where she becomes King. The film follows Nur-e-Din's attempts to track her down in which he gets into several erotic and also slapstick scenarios. Woven into the narrative are the tales of several travellers. With abundant nudity and sex, Arabian Nights really is an erotic masterpiece. It is hard to make such a sexual film without it coming over as excessive, gratuitous or sleazy, but Pasolini deftly handles the material and the erotic scenes in the movie are filmed in a highly naturalistic way and there is no sensationalism. The film is poetic and beautiful, it is difficult to think of a movie director other than Pasolini making such a film. Pasolini brought both a realism, and simultaneously, a mystery to the film that makes it intoxicating viewing. At 130 minutes, the time flies by rather than dragging. Due to all of the sexual jiggery pokery, Arabian Nights was originally rated X in 1980 and today holds an NC-17.