Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is a 1975 film by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (his last) which applies Sade's aristocratic libertinage to Mussolini's Italian regime. The plot begins with small groups of impoverished young men and women being "abducted," so to speak, from their lives and taken to a country villa, awaited by a clan of four masters and four mistresses. While it is not precisely clear why these people have enlisted detainees, they begin an ever-escalating series of objectifying and degrading installments, attempting to push the prisoners to the brink of their sanity. Pasolini edited the film into four segments which resemble cantos of Dante's divine comedy, a fair touch.While the overall aim of the film, that which exposes humanity's perverse capacity for moral and physical corruption as a means to no particular end, is well justified, I was somehow dissatisfied with the cinematography or some such quality of the filming. This arose mainly from the detached way in which the scenes were shot. The vignettes were so stylized that one couldn't help but feel that they were watching a movie-within-a-movie as opposed to any literal transposition of events. It is however quite possible that the director intended this lack of "realism" to contribute to his purpose for making the film, but the only effect it had on me is that I became slightly bored.
I had wanted to see this film for sometime; I think I read about it a few years ago in an essay about Peter Weiss's play Marat/Sade (a decent play, but also lackluster for me). Thus, my review is as such: worth a view, if only to see a pivotal work by a great director, but certainly not as visceral as one would expect (or as I would appreciate).
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