Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975) 115m.
I've yet to read more than two pages of the infamous Marquis de Sade volume on which this film was based, but that's still enough to establish the cataloguing of carnality and scatology that appears to be the books raison d'etre. After working his way ever more deeply into controversial subject matter such as sex, religion, and politics, director Pier Paolo Pasolini finally decided to go the whole hog and make a film from a text which single-handedly defined the term 'unfilmable'. He would be bludgeoned to death near a soccer field shortly after filming was completed, making this his final opus - but after SALO he would have been hard pressed to come up with material for an encore.
SALO starts with gorgeous, summery photography of rural Italy but quickly moves indoors and stays there for the duration of the story. This is Italy under fascism in the 1940s, and the mansion that is the central set of the film plays host to a number of appalling aberrations beneath its sunny skies. In Pasolini's restructuring of the original text, a group of wealthy, corrupt fascists have rounded up young Italians and imprisoned them within a large country estate in order to play out the De Sade book as if it were a type of instruction manual (Pasolini actually kept his cast inside the mansion for nearly two months of shooting). Whether or not they hope to learn something more about their own baser nature isn't even a subject for consideration as they humiliate and torture their hapless prisoners relentlessly. SALO is, by its subject, a confrontational film, and was banned outright in different countries. I think the charges brought against it are less a result of what is shown on screen than the sense that it appears so studiously committed to its own moral vacuum. You'll see more graphic sex and violence in other films but these are usually punctuations within a wider context - in SALO these elements are present constantly. Not for one moment are we offered any relief from the emotional and psychological torment being inflicted upon the fascist's victims, and just when we think the film is all bark and no bite, it offers a final scene that is horrific not only for what it portrays but because it can be the only logical conclusion.
I believe that SALO is not as controversial for its content as it is for the conditions it imposes upon the viewer from the outset: that there is no hope, that there will be no rescue, that these young people will suffer and that we will be witness to every moment of it. Because we accept these conditions and view on regardless we get the feeling that we are conspiring with an agenda of the film-maker's. Is it a film that exists more in the reaction to its content than the content itself? Is the event of the film emulating the anarchic argument behind De Sade's own scandalous writings? What's problematic with SALO is that by means of blasphemy, cruelty or depravity it positions itself as a dialogue with which the audience cannot help but engage, overwhelming conventional attitudes of storyline or character. I also can't help feeling that Pasolini's decision to update the text to a wartime setting is pure strategy on his part, as if allegory conveniently excuses his indulgence. It's not a film that should be banned (there were lines around the block when I went to see it), or that people should be discouraged from seeing, or that most people should be encouraged to see, for that matter. Ultimately, despite its controversy, I'm left with a muddled reaction to SALO. It's certainly disturbing, but probably for the wrong reasons. Just as De Sade's book tells you more about the man who wrote it than the work itself, so too do I think less of SALO as a film than the end-product of the man who made it.
sburridge@hotmail.com
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