Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Writer: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Citti (screenplay), Marquis de Sade (novel)
Loosely based the Marquis de Sade's novel and infused with elements from Dante's Inferno, Salò is set in an Italian province of the same name towards the end of World War II. A cabal of Nazi and Fascist libertines assembles eighteen young men and women (nine of each), with whom the libertines will have their way. The debaucheries are as brutal, humiliating, and vile as the war that continues on outside.
Writer: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Citti (screenplay), Marquis de Sade (novel)
Loosely based the Marquis de Sade's novel and infused with elements from Dante's Inferno, Salò is set in an Italian province of the same name towards the end of World War II. A cabal of Nazi and Fascist libertines assembles eighteen young men and women (nine of each), with whom the libertines will have their way. The debaucheries are as brutal, humiliating, and vile as the war that continues on outside.
A moment-to-moment synopsis can't accurately describe what happens in this film. Salò, to me, is one of those legendary movies you hear about in hushed tones. As a DVD collector I knew of the film because the Criterion Collection's first printing of it goes for several hundred dollars on eBay. Well, I finally broke down a spent ten dollars on a copy from South Korea. I've heard and read mixed reviews about how it's not as bad as the hype or that the film should not have been made, etc. As I see it, Salò is a strongly anti-war, anti-fascist statement. The graphic excess of violence and sexuality is heightened by the sounds of war outside. During the more insidious acts, the sound of airplanes (presumably bombers) rumble outside, a constant reminder that while the libertines might think of themselves as free, they are not. The anti-war sentiment of the film is handled different from films like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957), The Red and the White (1967), or even M*A*S*H (1970). Those films show the absurdity of war by displaying the human cost through military personnel. Salò deals more with the politics of war through the libertines. It is as if Pasolini is saying, "this is what could happen if truly mad men were in control." When left to their own devices, these men and women become monstrous much in the same way as 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.
For all the disturbing and stomach-turning content, Pasolini's direction is deft. While the DVD I have is not of the best quality, the images remain strong. The use of natural lighting and locations, along with the use of long takes adds to the film's realism. And the realism is where the film finds its effectiveness. At the beginning of the film, one of the four "masters" comments, "all things are good when taken to excess." One of the points made in Salò is that the opposite is true: excess leads to destruction. The repeated graphic content serves to remove any eroticism from the film. As a long time hardcore horror buff, I've seen a lot of repellant images. I even sat unblinking through a certain internet video whose "reaction videos" are more popular than the original itself. With that said, Salò disturbed and sickened me. The reason being the overall, cumulative context in which the scenes are presented. A viewer can become desensitized to a barrage of meaningless, abhorrent images very easily. If those same images are given a context, such as the insular microcosm of Salò, then the images are given weight and their impact strengthened.
