The Little Hours (2017) on Netflix
Massetto flees his master, Lord Bruno, after sleeping with Bruno's wife. He hides at a convent, where he must pose as a deaf-mute gardener for three young nuns.
- Netflix2.7/5
- IMDb5.8/1029,032 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes78%
Trailer
Plot summary
Garfagnana, Italy, 1347. Sister Alessandra wants a husband, but her father Ilario cannot raise a dowry and tells her that keeping her at the convent is cheaper for the family. Sister Fernanda and Sister Ginevra share the convent with her, and the groundskeeper leaves after the sisters drive him off. Meanwhile Massetto, a servant, flees Lord Bruno's castle after sleeping with the lord's wife, Francesca. In the woods he finds Father Tommasso drunk beside his overturned cart, the embroidery for market lost in the river. Massetto recovers the wet fabrics, and Tommasso offers him shelter and work as the convent's gardener, provided he pretends to be deaf and mute. The convent's mother superior takes him on as groundskeeper.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Little Hours (2017)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Writer-director Jeff Baena conceived the film while high and watching DOGTV with filmmaker friend Joe Swanberg, describing his college studies of medieval sexual transgression and Boccaccio's The Decameron and his long-standing wish to make a "medieval combat nun movie"; Swanberg encouraged him to actually make it.
- Distributor Gunpowder & Sky turned the Catholic League's condemnation into a marketing tagline, pulling the phrase "trash, pure trash" from the group's disparaging article and using it to promote the film.
- Before release, the group America Needs Fatima gathered 31,000 petition signatures and the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property gathered 20,000 more demanding the film be canceled for misrepresenting priests and nuns, and the Catholic League published a disparaging article about it, despite none of these groups having actually seen the film.
- As part of the film's promotion, Aubrey Plaza prepared and smoked weed with the non-religious "weed nuns" of Sisters of the Valley, who are not an actual religious order.
- Opening in just two theaters, the film took in $56,676 on its opening weekend, giving it the highest per-theater average of any film in the country that weekend.
- Baena asked Garry Marshall, who had appeared in his directorial debut Life After Beth, to take a role in the film, but Marshall was too ill to travel and died a few months later.
