Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975) (AKA
Salo o le 120 giornate di Sodoma)
Note: Some
spoilers
"Salo" is a legendary film. I first
heard of it in the early nineties when I told a co-worker
I was into art films. Maybe we were talking about
"For a Lost Soldier;" I don't remember. But, somehow,
this turned the conversation towards "Salo," which
my somewhat stodgy co-worker had seen while in college.
My jaw dropped when he described it as a pornographic
film where a bunch of Nazi keep young boys and girls
captive, rape them, debase them and make them eat
shit. My interest was, of course, piqued.
Through the years, I read more and
more about "Salo" and found it on sale for hundreds
of dollars on the Internet. The more you read about
the film, the more you want to see it. Even if it
is just a morbid curiosity, you feel like it is a
film you just have to see. I never quite made the
leap of buying the film so I could see it but did
try to see other films by Italian director Pier Paolao
Pasolini in an attempt to familiarize myself with
this work. Most of these films were quite dismal and
uninteresting. Still, "Salo" stayed close to the top
of my "must-see" list.
"Salo" is based on a work of the
Marquis de Sade and it was questionable whether I
would like this work. While Fassbinder butchered the
author with "Querelle," Phillip Kaufman humanized
him with "Quills." Reading the Marquis' work one realizes
that he was never boring nor acceptable not matter
what these films did with his work. Could Pasolini
be able to bring a piece of his work to the screen
with the required vulgarity? All of these questions
and preconceptions swirled around in my head as I
went - feeling quite titillated - to the Alamo Drafthouse
here in Austin one Thursday night at midnight for
a screening of the infamous film. After over 10 years
of speculation, I was finally going to be able to
see the film that had been in the back of my mind
for ten years.
The film starts typically enough
with an abandoned area of Italy circa 1970 posing
as the sparse, bombed-out country during the height
of WWII. Young men and women are rounded up by army
officers in Nazi uniforms. Some businessmen types
are taken to see them and after stripping a few of
them nude, pick some out. We in the audience know
their intent but, of course, the youths do not. There
are some fresh faced and young looking teenagers used
in the film but Pasolini makes the fatal error of
including some younger kids in these scenes. Therefore,
we wonder why these debauched men do not choose more
"children" for their sick games. The answer is obvious:
It's a film. They can't. It would be illegal. If Pasolini
had cast these scenes with only the featured captive
and other youngsters in their 20's and then had the
men choose the fresh faced teenagers from among them,
their youthfulness would seem even more salacious.
This isn't to say that most of the youngsters don't
seem very young but compared to the young boys and
girls who aren't chosen, they seem, at the very least,
to be of age.
Taken to a mansion in the countryside,
the youths are kept in groups with the men who chose
them. At night they are regaled with debauched stories
from an older woman who talks of being sexually used
as a prostitute when she was very young. These tales
are supposedly meant to inspire the men, giving them
ideas how to abuse their own victims. How sorry are
these guys as captors and rapists if they can't come
up with sick and perverted ideas on their own? It
of course again seems as a way for the film to appear
corrupt while describing acts that it could never
depict. But the older woman telling the tales is so
ugly, one only becomes disgusted rather than titillated.
Some of the more intense and overtly
pornographic scenes feature the naked youths leashed
as dogs and made to act like canines. They seem to
truly enjoy this sequence. There are also urination
scenes, anal sex scenes, cross dressing, molestation,
mild violence and beating and other perverse albeit
softcore (by today's standards) scenes in the film
before the piece slams headfirst into a lengthy and
unappealing scatological midsection called "The Circle
of Shit" that is both revolting and silly.
Although the Marquis de Sade was
preoccupied with scatological matters, it seems like
this would be more acceptable as a small sequence
in a film. Instead, here, it becomes a rather lengthy
mid-section to the film that is highly unenjoyable.
Only those truly turned-on by such repulsive matters
will find much to enjoy here, not to mention that
it all also seems like it could be done better. The
youths here are forced to eat defecation at times
and although they looks hesitant, they never gag or
seem as violently repulsed as someone surely would
if forced to engage in such an activity. They don't
even scrunch up their noses at the supposed smell
of the stuff.
The finale of the film is the most
perverse and the most troubling. The sequence, called
"The Circle of Blood" acts as climax to the film.
Oddly, Pasolini presents this sequence, filled with
torture and violence towards the youths, with a detached
distancing that makes the scenes all the more troubling.
But there is a major problem here. As each man sits
high in the villa and looks over a large courtyard
with binoculars, his peers kill and torture the young
men and women they have supposedly held captive and
molested for the titular 120 days. The acts are repugnant.
A tongue is cut off, an eye gouged out and a hot iron
wielded to nipples among other activities. The perverted
voyeurs watch with delight. But while each takes a
turn watching, his peers commit the acts. This scene
would work much better if the young soldiers who act
as guards for the men were forced to commit these
heinous crimes while their captors and commanders
looked on with passive intensity. Instead, the older
men look ridiculous, forced to wear S&M gear and enact
silly obviously phoney (especially by todays standards)
gore scenes.
In fact, Pasolini's film generally
seems more interested in uniform fetish than in verisimilitude.
Pasolini isn't necessarily interested in presenting
a realistic look of the era. Rather, his film reverberates
in its sparse and sleek images. This is a film about
vapidity and meaninglessness. Pasolini's script often
features wry and pointed comments about the differences
in classes and the elitist nature of the older men
who truly have no political or fascist interests other
than to enjoy the happenstance which places them in
a position of power of the less fortunate youths.
For all its torturous barbarism, the film is really
not political per se.
The very end of "Salo" makes the
entire 2 hour excursion into minimalist vulgarity
worthwhile. As two young guards dance to music on
a radio, while the horrors of torture continue in
the courtyard, one casually asks the other the name
of his girlfriend. "Margarite," his youthful companion
replies. The film then fades to its final frame. Here
Pasolini suggests the passivity of those in minimal
positions of power. While some of the guards seem
to share in the thrill of debauchery with the older
men, these two do not. Rather, they are just in the
middle. Not corrupt fascists nor pitiful victims,
although they are about the same age as the youths,
they are the "silent" middle that stands by accepting
minimal positions of authority while not being interested
in the disgusting political victimization that surrounds
them. While many people question the fervor of the
German people during WWII which allowed Hitler to
enact horrors, the truly revolting fact of the matter
is that it was the disinterest of most of the populace
that allowed him to enact such havoc. That is Pasolini's
biggest political statement here. We watch this repugnant
molestation and violence and are just as distanced
from it as the guards. We, the audience, have also
become the silent middle.
In the modern age of Internet pornography
and DVD's and videos that allow the most erotic and
disgusting images imaginable to enter our homes, Pasolini's
"Salo" seems very tame. While there are a few images
and ideas in here that seem truly perverse and still
shocking, the fact of the matter is that most of us
have seen far more graphic and more disturbing images
of young people being sexually and politically degraded
than we see in this film. Still, with its titillating
perversity, its moments of sexual masochism and sadism,
and its fresh faced youthful victims, and its questioning
of political corruption and political passivity, the
film is still valid and worth seeing. Its just that
when I watched it, I couldn't help but wishing it
went a little further. I couldn't help but wish that
someone like Bruce La Bruce would do a hardcore remake
of it.
Notes:
Pasolini's last film before he was
murdered.
The film has been banned or had
much footage cut by censors in many countries. Therefore
several version are in circulation and rarely seen
bits and pieces of the film surface from time to time.
First screened in America in 1977.
Viewed at the Alamo Drafthouse in
February 2004. This was a nice print that was promoted
as a "new 35mm print."
