In his version of the Middle and Near Eastern tales called the Arabian Nights, Pasolini revels in the sheer joy of storytelling, elaborately intertwining a series of meandering episodes that lend the film a rich narrative complexity. Eliminating the storyteller Scheherazade, Pasolini instead embeds the nested stories within a framing narrative about a poor young man searching for the escaped slave girl who is his lost love. Like The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, the film abounds in nudity and scenes of sexuality, although cast now in a far sunnier mood than those two films, perhaps an expression of Pasolini’s declaration to have “liberated” himself by shooting for the first time in distant non-European disparate locales, from Ethiopia to Nepal, and using a cast combining Pasolini regulars with nonprofessional actors found on location.