Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

I just the other day finished the delightful novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres. It deals with a part of World War II that's seldom covered in the popular media - the Italian invasion and occupation of Greece. One thing led to another, I found myself reading up of the fantastically ludicrous and fascinating character that was Benito Mussolini, and before I knew it I was having an Italian theme night. This means that I had pasta for dinner, opened a bottle of spumante I'd been given by my father, and sat down to watch Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

This was not my first time watching Salo, although the first time I saw it was so long ago that I'm pretty sure my copy back then was delivered to me from Quickflix via messenger pigeon. On first viewing, I didn't think much of it. I was young and not yet fully formed, and a recent fascination with extreme horror films meant that I found it aimless, pointless, and kind of boring. Coming back to it as a thirty-seven year old man, I still kind of find it aimless, pointless and kind of boring. But I can now at least sort of appreciate what the film is getting at, and why it's structured the way it is.

I won't bore people with a pocket history of the Republic of Salo - just read the Wikipedia article like I did. But I do find it hard to believe that it was anything like what's depicted here. I guess the thing is that Pasolini set out to make a film of the novel 120 Days of Sodom by de Sade, and at some point it got tangled up in his political views and he decided to set it in Salo instead. And fair enough. I mean, there's no shortage of films depicting the upper echelons of various Fascist regimes as depraved lunatics, but it's a solid setting for a film. And what separates this film from, say, Caligula, is that there's a passion and a conviction to the proceedings. You could easily class Salo as an extreme exploitation film, but you'd be wrong. This movie is sincere. Ultimately, though, it's sincere to its detriment - after all, this is a film where people are served a banquet of shit, which contains in its opening credits a suggested reading list of pertinent philosophical essays. So yeah, this movie is really the last word in highly pretentious 1970s excess. 

The premise is very simple. A bunch of high ranking officials kidnap a bunch of attractive young people, take them to an opulent villa, and subject them to a series of bizarre and highly ritualised acts of sexual and psychological degradation. Also, there's a lot of shit. Like so much. By halfway through this movie, all anyone can talk about is shit. 

The problem (aside from all the shit), is that there are no characters in this film. It's possible that Pasolini wanted to show the captives as ciphers so that they could stand in for the proletariat in an authoritarian state. And I guess the film is mostly shown from the perspective of the four officials, for the purposes of causing the viewer to identify with their deeply warped vision of a world where nothing matters but the complete personal liberty that comes from wielding absolute power. But the problem to me is that you can't really appreciate that someone is being dehumanised unless you get a chance to see them as human in the first place. A good example would be the film Martyrs (another deeply uncomfortable watch), where we follow the complete physical and psychological disintegration of a single woman subjected to the machinations of a cabal of sickos similar to the one in Salo. 

That said, there are some moments when the captives break out of their roles as ciphers and show the human beings suffering underneath. I guess maybe a problem is that the times have changed. In the 1970s, this film must have been unbelievably shocking. Almost fifty years later, in an era of limitless free hardcore pornography and multiple Eli Roth films, I guess the impact has been dulled a bit. Then again, maybe that's the point - the suffering of these people is so abject that we should care for them despite knowing nothing about them, instead of just viewing them as characters in a film. Who knows?

There is one sequence in the film, however, that I find really works. It's when one of the captives is caught breaking the rules, and betrays another captive, who betrays another, until finally the Four Officials discover one of their black shirt guards in flagrante delecto with a maid. His response is to stand tall and face his execution giving the raised fist of the united workers - an action so unexpected by the Officials, who have all long since abandoned any pretence to convictions of any kind, let alone the moribund Fascist party or the international workers' movement, that they are momentarily frozen in their tracks. Not only is it a great moment, but it shows the position the populace is placed in under a totalitarian regime. One must quietly obey, in which case one can still find oneself victimised, or else collaborate to better ones lot and save ones own skin. And poor Ezio winds up riddled with bullets by the very people to whom he has always behaved loyally, whatever his convictions. 

In the end, I'm still not sure what to make of Salo. As a depiction of human cruelty and an exercise in surreal and psychological horror, it works wonderfully. As an attempt at political allegory I can't really recommend it. Possibly I am missing the point. But then it's not like I get paid to write this, and you're not paying to read it. In the end, I'm glad Salo exists. It's sort of the last word in films of this type, a rite of passage for people interested in the extreme side of art cinema. I don't think it's as deep and complex as some people make out, but if you're interested in a film that can simultaneously fire your brain and make you want to vomit, Salo is the film for you.