Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Starring: Aldo Valletti, Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
The film: More than three decades after it was first released, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom is still able to shock. The human carnage in the film is as disturbing as ever even in the age of ultra-violent Hollywood flicks.
Of course, to judge Pier Paolo Pasolini's last film (he was assassinated before its release) on the grounds of gore and body counts would miss the point altogether. It would be like looking at Salo as the Moral Right has done, claiming it is simply an exploitative film in art house disguise. It's not: rather than presenting voyeuristic pleasures of physical torture, Salo avoids explicit expressions of ecstasy or pain which pornography thrives on. It seeks to criticise the reducing of human bodies to empty vessels manipulated by those in power.
Based on Marquis de Sade's 120 Days in Sodom, the film relocates the mayhem as described in the book to a villa in the Italian Social Republic, the Nazi-backed state at the tail-end of the second world war. Conventional moral codes are seemingly suspended. The situation resembles that of Benito Mussolini's short-lived entity, in which Black Brigades ran amok and committed horrendous atrocities. In the film, four sinister, middle-aged libertines have a coterie of teenage underlings rounding up 18 young men and women and then submitting them to gruesome sadistic acts.