Starring Aubrey Plaza

A bunch of great comic actors get to romp around in rural Tuscany in The Little Hours, and it’s also pretty fun for us, too. Following Joshy (2016) and 2014’s likable zom-com Life After Beth, writer-director Jeff Baena here gets to exorcise a jones for medieval literature—didn’t see that coming!—specifically, the tale of a horny young fugitive hiding out in a 14th-century convent, ripped with some almighty liberties from The Decameron. As Sister Fernanda, the angriest and most rebellious of a trio of nuns, Baena’s partner and Life After Beth star Aubrey Plaza nominally leads the ensemble cast with perhaps a tad too much reliance on her resting-bitch chops. Rounded out by the not entirely committed Sister Alessandra (Alison Brie, How to Be Single) and gonzo Sister Ginerva (Kate Micucci, Garfunkel and Oates), the joke here is that the hot-to-trot threesome speak in contemporary lingo replete with lots of F bombs, while striking a flip attitude heavy on the eye-rolling and middle-school politics.

It all gets off to a wonderful start with Fernanda and Co. viciously attacking the handyman Lurco, played by Grandma filmmaker Paul Weitz. Since nobody was thinking too carefully about sublimated libidos back then, John C. Reilly’s sweetly ineffectual, wine-loving Father Tommasso (he can’t even get the facts about sodomy straight) decides to replace Lurco with Tom Cruise look-alike Massetto (Dave Franco, Neighbours). He’s on the run after banging Francesca (scene-stealer Lauren Weedman, Wilson), wife of the vengeance-obsessed Lord Bruno (The Hero’s Nick Offerman, having a ball). Fred Armisen and Molly Shannon are also onboard, as a visiting bishop and Mother Superior, respectively, so be assured: it’s a blast, like a 90-minute episode of Drunk History upgraded with spectacular photography. But it isn’t bawdy, which The Little Hours very much wants to be, awkward moments of nudity included. Baena was never going to get erotic delirium from these self-consciously hip young American stars, but whatever. It still has way more laughs than Flavia the Heretic.

Georgia Straight, July 2017