Salo DVD+Blu-ray

Talking about the genesis of what would become his final film – he was murdered in circumstances that are still mysterious shortly after completing the film – Pier Paolo Pasolini revealed that the idea to transpose the Marquis de Sade’s 18th century novel of aristocratic sexual depravity to the last days of Mussolini’s regime in the Republic of Salò in 1944, came to him not as the result of sustained thought but in a flash of inspiration. He had been working on an adaptation together with his regular collaborator Sergio Citti and found that as Citti gradually lost interest, he himself became attracted by the potential of the novel in crafting a searing, purposefully unpalatable, and deeply personal indictment of both contemporary consumerist culture and the “anarchy of power”.

Placing the film within Pasolini’s oeuvre and in the context of his forthright and highly pessimistic views on 1970s Italy is crucial in understanding a film which, after more than three decades, still retains a unique power to shock and repulse – quite intentionally so. Utilising a structure loosely parallel to Dante’s inferno, Salò tells of a group of four upper class fascists (including a bishop and a duke) who round up a large group of adolescents from the local town to stage a depraved orgy of sex and murder in a secluded villa.

Just as his previous three films – The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974), collectively known as the joyful ‘trilogy of life’ – celebrated bodily pleasures, Salò, whilst set in 1944, was an attack on what Pasolini called “the power of today ... that manipulates bodies in a horrible way that has nothing to envy that of the Nazis”. The so-called permissive, consumerist society of the 1970s had, for the Marxist Pasolini, “ended in a genocide of living, real cultures”.

Unrelenting in its often horrifying sexual and violent content, Salò is also meticulously constructed and edited with a glacial precision absent from Pasolini’s previous work. The director attributed the film’s refusal to elicit sympathy for the victims to the simple fact that “if it had, an audience wouldn’t last five minutes”.

on 10th September 2008
Author of 52 reviews