Saló o los 120 días de Sodoma

This is on the list of most disturbing movies ever. But it's not disturbing for the sake of it. There is an underlying exposition of a fascist government and it's ability to control to the most depraved extremes. I don't need to go into the plot, just don't watch if your skin crawls easily.

Apparently based loosely on the Marquis de Sade's eponymous story, it feels dirty...it feels icky. You will not finish the film feeling happy, relieved, redeemed, or satisfied. You will feel that humanity is capable of terrible things and sometimes for no real reason other than they can. It shows what happens when people blindly follow terrible people and abandoned their own sense of decency. The following orders defense will never work. When you've become an accomplice you ate equally guilty.

This movie has depth, but it's not an easy watch. It's not for a simple eve with a date. I can't imagine watching this with anyone other than fellow film students or a significant other you've been with for years.

disturbing. this is the basic conclusion about the last film by Pasolini. denunciation of fascism and bourgeoisie. a masterpiece. last fight of Pasolini against his demons. disgusting. a trash. demonstration of madness. chaotic and boring and scatological. for me, it is only the end of a way. a kind of verdict. after a career in search of truth and beauty and the measure. Salo is a social and political manifesto. attack against hypocrisy and denunciation of the traces of fascism. a film as a form of exorcism. cruel and honest and hopeless. but, after 40 years, it is perceived in different manner. its message is suffocated by the violence of images. the temptation to discover it as portrait of consumerism is covered by the forms of eroticism. and about the waves of prejudices. it is a Pasolini. the last. this is only important thing. the rest - manifestation of personal perceptions.

"Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom" (1975): Be prepared for one of the roughest films you'll ever see. This was Pasolini's last, and going by what I've seen, his vision only became bleaker and more disturbed as the years clawed along. Using the Marquis de Sade's ideas on the decadence of 18th century France, Pasolini represents Fascist Italy (1944-45). We are shown the upper class – always removed and protected from the outer world – as predators of the poor, weak, young, and less educated. A group of wealthy adults shop amongst the kidnapped older children of bourgeoisie. They choose eighteen, and steal them away to a hidden mansion, where there is no escape. There, the adults live out every twisted fantasy they've ever had or can now muster, while demeaning, raping, and torturing the youngsters. The teens react in many ways, none of which are "pretty". This entire film experience MUST be viewed as a symbolic, emotional "explanation" of what it was like to live under Nazi/Fascist rule (in this case), and how an otherwise normal, decent society could be turned into lunatics and sub-animals. Although made 30 years ago (with the usual weaker production qualities of that era), I cannot think of another work which so blatantly and painfully illustrates what those in power are capable of doing when boredom gives rein to impulse. In comparison, "Lord of the Flies" barely lights upon these issues, "Pink Flamingos" was but a tiny, kitschy springboard, and "Schindler's List" described a much narrower range of degradation. To this day, "Salo: …" is banned in some countries. This is NOT a film about acting, lighting, sound, camera work, etc.. This is a film about states of mind – theirs then, ours now. P.S.: If you are interested in set design, this one is FILLED with original Cubist/Bauhaus/Futurist/Moderne furnishings, murals, and art. Spectacular. Those styles were not yet being reproduced, so Pasolini used the real thing. There is also an interesting use of a Charles Rennie MacIntosh chair…which will alter how you see this design from here on out.

Salo, the final film by Pasolini, is far and away the most affecting film I've ever seen of it's type. The images that it shows will stay with every viewer forever, they are unforgettable. Yet, you will wish you could forget them.

The film is about a group of rich Fascists during WWII-Nazi Occupied Italy, where they kidnap a group of 18 youngsters, allowing only physically perfect specimins to stay, and subject them to various forms of mental, physical and sexual torture over the next 120 Days. The torture starts off in a sexual nature--Sodomy, rape, humiliation and so on-- and slowly degrades and descends into mental and physical torture. Just when you think what you are seeing can't get worse, it does, ten-fold.

What makes Salo so brutally shocking and disturbing is its uncompromised and blunt way of showing the acts of horror. It is a very quiet and slow film, mostly shot using static and still cameras, it feels more like a documentary than a fictional film. It's clear upon viewing, that Pasolini wanted to remind us all that violence should not be entertainment. As such, every act of violence and degredation is drained of all its possible energy and excitement, and shown in a sad, painful light. Nothing is sugar coated, nothing is softened. This film is an attack on our desensitized feelings towards violence. Yet, at the same time, the film purposely desensitizes us to certain acts -- Such as rape. We see it so much during the film that it becomes "normality" to us, we barely raise an eyebrow. Upon realizing this, one also realizes how the horrible acts shown in the film are possible, and it's a terrible realization.

Salo continues to descend until at the end, when we are taken to the punishing grounds, where various rule breakers are tortured and murdered. This final sequence is the most harrowing and effective I've ever seen in a film. As the victims are tortured and murdered, each one of the fascist rulers take turns as voyer, watching from a second story window, far enough away to not hear the screams of terror and pain. And we watch with him. The film attempts to equate our viewing of this film to their viewing of the executions, after all, we're watching these acts for "entertainment", just as he is. And we distance ourselves from the acts in order to enjoy them, as he does by watching through binoculars far away. It's a savage and truthful attack, one that is impossible to deny.

Also incredibly unsettling is the inherent joy that the villains (Heroes?) feel at their victims pain, sadness and discomfort. Sometimes even to the point of sexual arousal. There is a scene where a girl is crying because her mother died trying to save her from these people. She is completely naked as she weeps, to us, she's the picture of vulnerability and sadness, to the fascists, it's the most exciting thing they've seen all day. The fascists all stand and watch her weep with the utmost sexualexcitement. It is terrifying. It's scenes like these that set Salo apart from other "gross out" movies. Some of the most affecting and frightening scenes are ones where there is quiet, watching the expressions and reactions of people to the various horrible acts.

Salo is a film of rage and sadness. It is a film that asks you to hate humanity, to hate what we're capable of; to look in the mirror and hate yourself. Then weep because nothing can be done about it. Nothing will ever change..

Pasolini made it quite clear in several texts that this is not an anti-fascist film, but rather that fascism is a symbol for something far more pervasive. He ultimately saw himself as a committed director, and thus all of his historical films are about the present, and this film was made in the 70's, not in the 40's. It is rather an anti-bourgeois film. (Pasolini's political enemies at the time were not fascists at all, but the Christian Democrats)...Furthermore it is NOT a defense of Sade, but an apology for his earlier writings and films which mythicized acts of violence and glorified them as the pure, unconscious, pre-verbal expression of the subproletariat. However Pasolini saw the riots of the bourgeois students in 1968 as nihilistic acts of revolt, not revolution--a revolt of the Bourgeoise against itself, as his poetry makes clear. He watched in horror as he saw his vision of true revolution twisted into a childish and merely destructive tantrum against the previous generation. And so it is the Bourgeoise, symbolized by Fascism, which he represents and condemns in Salo, in the guise of what he considered to be a medieval morality play. And it is in this context that he apologizes for having made statements like "Only a bloodbath can save the world" (1962), which is quoted in the film. Yet, like everything else, it has been appropriated by the bourgeoise, who misinterpret it first as Nietzsche, then as St. Paul, until it gets reduced to a merely absurdist Dada interpretation. The characters are continually misinterpreting the many structuralist citations, because they have no history. History has been destroyed, and thus Pasolini is trying to re-introduce it in the film. The revolution, by 1968, was impossible, as there was nobody left to fight it. The bourgeoise, Pasolini lamented, had subsumed everything into itself-there was no "other", only a technological god-like and all-inclusive power structure. But what is most shocking is that it is the Sadean libertarianism and the permissivness of that class that Pasolini finds most disturbing. He held that the permissiveness of the "anarchy of power" was more tyrannical than repression. He was most traumitized, oddly, by the increasing tolerance of homosexuals. And so truely Pasolini takes the side of Dante, not Sade. And finally, its ultimately a film about misinterpretation. What the characters say and what they do (as in Sade) are incongruent. He knew that he was to be misunderstood by his Bourgeois audience, as it misunderstood itself, Pasolini said that it was intrinsic that Salo remain enigmatic (on the model of Dante), and this is the film's real genius. Judging by most of these reviews, Pasolini made his point.