Director: Jeff Baena
A trio of foul-mouthed medieval nuns upend convent life in Jeff Baena's deadpan period comedy, a loose and largely improvised riff on tales from Boccaccio's Decameron.
What is The Little Hours about?
Behind the walls of a fourteenth-century Italian convent, three restless young nuns — Alessandra, Fernanda and Ginevra — chafe against the boredom, chores and small rivalries of monastic routine. When a young servant flees his master's household and is taken in under the pretense that he is a deaf-mute laborer, the sisters' curiosity, jealousy and appetite for mischief begin to boil over. The abbey's picture of pious calm slowly curdles into gossip, feuds and escalating comic chaos, while the local priest and a visiting church official scramble to keep the growing scandal from spilling into the open.
Cast & crew
Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza and Kate Micucci lead as the three nuns, with Dave Franco as the runaway servant and John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon as the flustered priest and abbess. Nick Offerman, Fred Armisen, Jemima Kirke and Lauren Weedman round out an ensemble of seasoned comic performers who improvise much of the film's deliberately modern-sounding dialogue.
Context & significance
Written and directed by Jeff Baena, The Little Hours premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2017 and reworks several bawdy stories from Giovanni Boccaccio's fourteenth-century Decameron. Rather than mimic period speech, the cast delivers contemporary, mostly unscripted banter against authentic medieval costumes and Tuscan locations, and that contrast drives most of the humor. Running about ninety minutes, this Canadian-American production blends farce, romance and a gentle satire of cloistered religious life, leaning throughout on a tight troupe of American comedy regulars.
Where & how to watch
You can stream The Little Hours on K-Time with Persian subtitles. The page you are reading is free to browse, and starting playback simply asks you to sign in with a free K-Time account. The Farsi-first interface makes it easy for Persian-speaking viewers across the diaspora to find the title, follow the subtitles and resume from where they left off on any device.