Criterion Confessions

"All's good if it's excessive."

Once upon a time, Criterion spine #17 was the rarest of the collection*. The early release of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1976 shocker Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom was the one of the first discs to go out of print for the label, disappearing not long after it had first been issued. Copies of the release sold for several hundred dollars on eBay, and fans created online guides to steer potential buyers through the murky waters of knock-offs and bootlegs.

When I was working on building a complete Criterion library some ten years ago, Salò was always the one that eluded me. Both the cost-prohibitive mark-up and the movie's scandalous reputation made me gun shy. Eventually, I bought a dubious Chinese facsimile so I could actually watch the thing. My hope was, if Salò was as off-putting as everyone said, viewing it would convince me that it was not something I needed to drop major coin on.

The theory panned out. One time through with Salò was enough for me. It was not a movie I ever felt the need to see again. I finally bought the legitimate reissue a couple of years ago, but I never even opened it. It was gathering dust on my shelf, still wrapped in plastic, when the Blu-Ray came through. I guess enough time had passed. I was finally going to watch Salò a second time after all...

Pasolini's film in is an infamous slab of transgressive art. Inspired by the work of the Marquis de Sade, the controversial Italian director leveled his aim on his country's ruling class. Though set during the years during World War II when Italy was occupied and the Fascist government colluded with the Nazis, Salò takes place away from the combat, isolated to a sprawling, secluded villa owned by a shadowy collective of privileged dignitaries. These men have formed a secret pact, marrying each other's daughters as an old-school symbol of joint power. The four of them are intense libertines, and they have kidnapped nine teenage boys and nine teenage girls, all virgins, and taken them to this hidden house to engage in their every depraved fantasy. With them are adolescent thugs who act as their enforcers and aging prostitutes who stimulate the conversation by sharing the greatest hits of their illustrious careers satisfying the kinky fetishes of other powerful men. The men listen to these stories of indulgence and then indulge themselves with their captives.

Salò is essentially an escalating chain of humiliation and degradation. As the days wear on, the humiliations inflicted on the kidnapped adolescents gets worse and worse. Religion is banished, as is any display of emotion. If any of the prisoners break these rules, their names go into a little black book. When the excursion is over, the list of wrongdoers will receive a special punishment. Indeed, that perversion of justice is the climax of Salò, an orgy of torture, rape, and death. It's a bizarre concept to wrap your head around. These children have been violated, forced to eat human feces, and beaten, and yet in this upside-down mini society, they are the sinners. You'd think there was no penalty left, yet for Pasolini, no matter how cruel a human can be, there is always someone more cruel, always a deeper level of selfishness and evil that man can sink to.

It can be hard to judge button-pushing art, especially once some time has passed. What was shocking and meaningful in 1976 may not have the same impact or relevance in 2011. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom still has the power to disgust. I retched more than once while watching it and frequently squinted or covered my eyes to obscure some of the more terrible depictions. So, I guess that is a win against the belief that we, as a filmgoing public, have been desensitized over the years by increased sex and violence in entertainment. Salò still has the power to make me sick.

On the other hand, it no longer has the power to shock. Maybe it's hard to compete in an age where we have something like The Human Centipede, the goal post has definitely been moved when it comes to deranged concepts. Or maybe it's that Pasolini's technique is so transparent, it's hard to take his film entirely seriously. Yes, much of what he shows on screen is gross, but some of it is also outright ridiculous. A man in leather panties and dog collar talking about how much he likes anuses and being urinated on may be a very real fetish, but the use of such images in Salò seems more like juvenile rabble-rousing than it does a mature exploration of challenging world views.

Which isn't to say that Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is without subtext. For as much as Pasolini is getting his jollies by creating this tableau of human indignity, he also is trying to make a point about the corrupt nature of governance and the true motivations behind fascism. Any will to power, his script suggests, is essentially selfish, no matter how much the would-be leaders crow about the greater good. In amongst the sex talk here, the abusers espouse theories about politics and human nature that seemingly explain and justify their actions. Pasolini undercuts their self-belief by demonstrating that these are just excuses they make in order to satisfy their own base urges. Unsurprisingly, the more harsh things get, survival tactics get more desperate. Prisoners turn on each other. Mankind is its own worst enemy.

Which is where I would guess Pasolini is really coming from. His contempt for the Fascists is equal to his contempt for the common man. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the product of a severe misanthrope, one whom I suspect wants to get back at a populace that has misunderstood and persecuted him. He is serving us the cinematic meal he thinks we deserve in a way that is almost ironic: he decries cruelty and humiliation by beating up his audience using all the tactics his villains use. You will know what he means because he will make you experience it.

It's not a particularly complex response to a complicated world. Were Pasolini's filmmaking skills not so refined, I'm not sure we'd still be watching and debating Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom all these years later. It's a well-made movie even if I don't think it's a very good one. I know it has its defenders, and to be honest, I take no issue with that, just as I think Pasolini wouldn't take issue with my negative analysis. Salò is meant to be visceral, and so any visceral reaction on the part of the viewership means success. For my money, though, a better film would have moved me in a more profound manner. It would have still caused me to look away, but it would also inspire me to think about why I had done so. The deepest question I took away from Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom had nothing to do with narrative or thematic meaning; rather, I just kept wondering how you cast a movie like this. How do you go about finding actors who will read the script and say, "Oh, you want me to strip down to nothing, pretend to get sodomized, and sit in a barrel of excrement? Sounds like the role of a lifetime!"

Criterion has put the two-disc Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom package onto one Blu-Ray, packaged in a handsome cardboard box with a thick 80-page book featuring credits, chapter listings, photos, and a collection of seven different essays about the movie from filmmakers and critics. It seems to me that it's essential for a film of this nature to acknowledge the debate and give space to a variety of voices to discuss it, so I'm pleased that Criterion has done so both in this written format and on the disc itself. The essays in the booklet actually connect well to the 23-minute Fade to Black featurette that talks to Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Breillat, and others about their reaction to the film.

Pasolini himself gets his say in the 33-minute "Salò: Yesterday and Today documentary, which actually did serve to make me appreciate his vision more. He had clear intentions for what he wanted to do, even if some of those intentions are lost in the translation between artist and audience. We also get a look at the actual production in the 40-minute The End of "Salò," which gathers participants and crew members to discuss the working process and also the aftermath, including Pasolini's murder prior to the movie getting released. Amongst those interviewed are set designer Dante Ferreti, who also returns for a separate 12-minute interview. Also interviewed alone is film scholar and director Jean-Pierre Gorin (28 minutes), an aficionado of Pasolini and an appreciative viewer of Salò.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk.

* In terms of actual number of copies on the market, the very first pressing of The Seven Samurai may total less than Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, but given that the only change was the removal of a tiny restoration demonstration, I always considered the pursuit of that particular collectible to be the province of the overly fanatical.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say there isn't a film in the Criterion Collection that I dislike more than Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl. Even now, three years after I first saw it, my lip still curls at the thought of the movie. This could be me falling into the filmmaker's trap, because Breillat is nothing if not a provocateur, but I'd wager that the film angers me not in the way she intended, nor in the way you likely suspect.

Brass tacks, I actually was mildly into the movie for the most part while the narrative spun out. Fat Girl is, for all intents and purposes, a coming-of-age story about two sisters on a seaside vacation in France. One sister, Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) is overweight, while the other, Elena (Roxane Mesquida), is a nymphet on the prowl. Naturally, in this scenario, Elena leads the way, and Anaïs is the tagalong. Breillat's camera follows them as Elena turns her boredom into lust, seducing (or being seduced by) the older boy Fernando (Libero de Renzo), an Italian law student whose smoky eyes mask murky motivations. Anaïs watches--sometimes silently, sometimes vocally petulant--as Elena tiptoes down the primrose path, getting an outsider's perspective on sex before also tasting a little of it firsthand.

Breillat's script is purposefully frank, and her main characters are purposefully off-putting. It's not a dishonest image of adolescent life. A teenage existence is a stinky brew of self-doubt and self-importance that often oozes from the subject like snot dripping from a puffy nose. If there is any sympathy to be felt for Anaïs, it's really Breillat playing on our preconceptions about how these stories are supposed to go. Our hearts naturally gravitate to the chubby sad girl, even if our eyes want to watch the sexy mean one. Where I think the director is intentionally trying to tweak us is that Anaïs is just as mean, possibly moreso. The film practically issues a challenge: I dare you to like her.

Fat Girl is also meant to challenge the conventional notions of female sexuality. Its uncensored depictions of the emerging passions of the sisters fit neither the kitten-clawed Hollywood notions of teenage Lolitas, nor does Breillat support a puritanical whitewash. She's also actively avoiding the pitfall of depicting first-time lovemaking in a nostalgic haze where everything is nice and pretty and seen through a rosy prism. Rather, it's kind of gross and kind of brutal and also darkly comic. (Breillat, years later, made a send-up of herself and this movie called Sex is Comedy, a little piece of meta that also calls Roxane Mesquida back to the beach where she lost her fictional girlhood, but was less appealing to me than even Fat Girl.)

None of these elements are where Breillat loses me. In fact, as I said, she mildly held my interest all the way up to the very end, when rather than coming up with a realistic way to get herself out of her own narrative, she goes for the cop-out. A violent attack on the family on the road back home changes everything, and it's a deus ex machina of the worst kind. The only way it could have been worse would have been for the camera to pan back, come out of a soft focus on Anaïs blissful face, and revealed that the entire film was some late-night fantasy in the character's head. It's that bad of a choice, eschewing any denouement for a rapid downshift out of the story, freeze frame, we're done.

Back in November of 2004, I wrote about the film on my Confessions of a Pop Fan blog, and I still stand by those words. My entry went as follows:

I've been contemplating the idea of endings lately. In a sense, when an audience enters into a story, they are putting their trust in the storyteller to take them somewhere. Whatever we are subjected to at the start is going to have some kind of payoff in the end, so even if we don't know where we are going, we have faith that it's all going to make sense.

Which is not a cry for pat endings, where everything is tied up. I am all for ambiguity, and I have said of myself, many times, that I prefer to end my stories at the moment before the "final" ending. I usually express it thus: I like to end on the inhale, and not wait for the exhale. It's a technique I took from Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, where the book ends as its main character answers the phone. He has been mute up until this point, but the phone acts as a wake-up call, and he speaks for the first time, the cap to a long ordeal. I think this is fine, because Kosinki's goal--the goal I share--is to make sure that all that precedes that wake-up call creates the map that leads to it. I may want you to choose what's next, but I have hopefully given you the proper information to make that choice; my movement towards the inhalation was purposeful. And the final moment isn't accidental or random, it's what the rest of the story supports.

It's when we think that the storyteller lost that sense of purpose, or is trying to sidestep having to answer all the questions he's posed, that we feel cheated. A lot of these thoughts are based on debates I've had with Christopher McQuain over some of Brian DePalma's films. DePalma often falls back on the hoary cliché of "It was all a dream," which to me feels like a tremendous cheat. Rather than do the work to get out of the situation he has created, he opts for an easy exit; on the other hand, Christopher sees the final destination in such a case as far less important than the thrill of the ride. That is a valid argument in something as deliberately lurid as, say, Femme Fatale, but I don't find it at all acceptable in something like the recent film Birth. In Birth, Nicole Kidman plays a woman who has been mourning her dead husband for several years, and when she finally is ready to move on with her life, he returns in the form of a grade schooler. The director and writers (it took three of them to end up with negative results) approach the subject very seriously, raising questions about boundaries in romantic relationships and the nature of madness. Rather than actually give us any real answers, they throw a twist into the last act that gets all of the characters out of the big mess they are in. They then play the game of, "But have they really gotten out?" Except it strikes me as cursory rather than intentional. I felt like by heaping on all sorts of stylistic brushstrokes, they thought I would be dazzled and never see that the film went nowhere. They had demanded a lot of me throughout a very moody, slowly paced film, so it's unfair that they didn't demand as much of themselves as the creators.

These issues were all brought up again upon viewing Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, a film about two sisters who are forced to live parallel but disparate lives, stuck in the quagmire of sexual adolescence. At the end of the film, a sudden and random act of violence changes everything, and then the film is over. Obviously, in real life, people who are victims of crime are victims of a random act. They never saw it coming, and their whole lives do end up hinging on the occurrence; however, is such a thing permissible in the world of story, where nothing is random, where every act contributes to a finite whole? Charlie winning the trip to the chocolate factory in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory isn't random, but expected: we know that's why he's the character that has been chosen for examination. But what if instead of it happening at the beginning of the story, it happens at the end? After 90 minutes of watching Charlie and his family struggle with poverty and illness, Charlie wins the lottery and their lives are saved. Would we not call such an ending pat?

So, why should it be any different with something like Fat Girl, where the filmmaker has chosen to fulfill some of her main character's desires and push her in a different direction, the direction the rest of her life will take, but rather than let the events take that course naturally, throws a roadside killer into the mix? Was his bursting through the windshield that far a cry from someone waking up in bed, screaming, drenched in cold sweat? It wouldn't be fair to say Breillat doesn't at least telegraph it a little. As soon as the family pulled onto the highway, I was waiting for something bad to happen, so she clearly did something to create a sense of dread (though what she did escapes me, almost like she relied on a filmic unconscious trained to believe something will go wrong in the final third). So, why do I feel like the older sister in Fat Girl, a victim of some foreign lothario, who swore he'd love me forever, only to leave me alone in the despair of broken promises? Or should I give Breillat more credit, that maybe that's what she meant all along?

Even then I was trying to be fair, to cut Catherine Breillat some slack for her intentions vs. my reactions, but I've never quite been able to do it.

In fact, I was so affected by this film and how it turned out, that it ended up influencing the book I was working on at the time, I Was Someone Dead. I was struggling with the author's note, a preface written by the book's fictional author, Percival Mendelssohn, the protagonist of my most recent novel, Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?. I was trying to explore levels of story in I Was Someone Dead, to uncover some of the layers of fiction and the different planes on which it can be removed from the reader--and in the case of having an invented author for the piece, from the storyteller, as well. (Not a new concept. See also: Vonnegut, Nabokov, Roth, etc.) Somewhat ironically, this preface became one of the most difficult aspects of the book to write, and it went through multiple drafts, most of them much longer and more constipated than what finally appeared.

I found six versions of the I Was Someone Dead author's note in my archives. Here is a pertinent excerpt from the original version:

Another phrase is "Truth is stranger than fiction." Everyone believes this cliché, but like everything else, they only believe it in a certain way. It's variable. Sometimes, someone might read a story in a newspaper and say, "That's too bizarre, they had to make that up;" that same person might read a novella and marvel at an outrageous event in the narrative, and mutter, "That's so bizarre, it must have really happened, no one could make that up." We, as people, shift with a spring-loaded suspension of disbelief.

The truth that is commonly believed to be stranger than fiction is usually an exceptional truth. Your every-day life, you will be told, or you maybe believe, is not interesting enough. Your existence would never make a good short story, much less a good novel. How ridiculous! In some ways, the banalities of the modern workday are the strangest things of all, just for the fact that we put up with them!

Truth is stranger than fiction, though, because in the events of real life, there is always an element of chance. Chance is an amazing thing. Chance is the idea that you could walk out your door and be hit by a bus; or more random and impossible, you are kidnapped by mistake, believed to be your next-door neighbor who is actually a scientist on the lam, scared that his amazing discoveries will fall into the wrong hands; or perhaps worst of all, that nothing at all will happen to you today that you did not expect. That last truth is actually the closest you will come to fiction, because there is nothing in a story that happens by accident. It's all planned to lead to a particular effect. An author can't get to his ending without it. Similarly, even if you are reporting on something that actually happened, once you shape it into a story to tell, it loses its randomness, as well. Everything still has to happen, or it won't be the same story.

So, while you may walk out of your house right now, and a van will pull up to the curb and men in ski masks will jump out and you'll have not expected it and you will have no idea why they are throwing you in the vehicle and taking you away, and when they report it on the six o'clock news they will call it random violence, in the context of the news broadcast, there will be nothing random about it. The very act of choosing to report it makes it concrete, and no one can ever be shocked again because it happened to you, because we are only talking about you because it happened; what would be random would be that though the report is about you, in reality it just happened to a completely different person.

This is where your truth becomes story. Human existence is Rashomon in practice. Consider that there are four Gospels, and each one offers a different account of the same event, each filters what happened through what they witnessed, through what they understood.

Perhaps it's karma that some readers complained about the printed version of the introduction, accusing me of trying to school them on how to read. Others also complained about the ending, feeling that I had not given enough of an explanation or put a fine enough point on the meaning of what they had just read. To which I shrug and say, "Fair enough."

I would assume that Catherine Breillat would give me a similar shrug. At the same time, I still wouldn't back off my distaste for the ending of Fat Girl. It's that sense of enforced randomness that still bugs me. Even if you read I Was Someone Dead (still in print, follow the link!) and feel I didn't give enough, I still took you where the story was always intended to go, I didn't back off or look for an easy way out. And, yes, while there is something to be said for defying the expectations of the audience, it has to be more than just a simple snap of the fingers. Watching Fat Girl is akin to being a little kid and being told you are going to Disneyland, only to have your father pull up in the parking lot at a doctor's office and inform you that you're there to get your shots. Not only did you lie, but you tricked us, too, and then you smugly told us it was for our own good. Shame on me, then, if I ever trust you again.