17 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

[Narshty]

DVD Beaver

[kaujot]

DVDTalk

[mfunk9786]

I just could not get over how sexy this film was.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

DVDTalk

In the review, Gibron writes that "It can be said that much of Saló plays like Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game without the latter's likable French farce elements, monochrome luxuriance, and lighthearted hand. The noted 1939 masterpiece offered a similar message - the bourgeoisie gave the Nazis a clear path into Western Europe via their privileged passivity - but fancied it up within a comedy of manners paradigm. Pasolini wants no such pleasantries. He's out to drive a stake into the very heart of his country's complacency, and doesn't care if it destroys his career in the process." I just found that interesting because of the whole Renoir/Pasolini comparison. I'd say that Renoir's film works better at what Gibron thinks Pasolini was doing, though.

[Narshty]

DVD Savant

[domino harvey]

DVD Savant

What an embarrassing review

Repulsed viewers will be forgiven if they interpret Salò itself as a source of Evil.

[Tommaso]

DVD Savant

What an embarrassing review

I can't agree. Erickson makes it clear that he (understandably) doesn't want to recommend the film to anyone and that he feels repulsed, but he gives a fair account of the film's motivations, background, filmic techniques, and reception. I liked the observation that modern-day 'torture-chic fans' might not think much of it. Indeed I always wondered why such stuff like "Saw" or "Hostel" didn't cause much outrage while Pasolini's film still provokes such heated debate. Probably because Pasolini refuses to make the horrors 'entertaining' and because the political and social implications of "Salo" are much more horrible (if that is thinkable) than what is going on on-screen. Or as Erickson writes:

There is a direct relationship between our present political realities and this "abominable" film from 1975.

[MichaelB]

Yes, I thought it was a much more balanced and intelligent review than the quote-mining suggested. In fact, Erickson's entirely reasonable take was clear from the opening paragraph when he says that:

Ironically, today's horror and torture-chic fans might not think much of it, a thought that appalls this reviewer -- and fits in perfectly with Pasolini's pessimistic opinions about modern culture as a commercial cesspool that makes human beings into a commodity.

[Narshty]

I liked the observation that modern-day 'torture-chic fans' might not think much of it. Indeed I always wondered why such stuff like "Saw" or "Hostel" didn't cause much outrage while Pasolini's film still provokes such heated debate.

Because those films, though ugly viewing, are made on the sheerest opportunism. Salo is deadly serious and, horrible though its individual atrocities are, it's the tone and intent that's most disturbing. It has 100% the courage of its convictions and consequently a weight that nasty-but-dismissable shite like Wolf Creek can't hope to match.

[colinr0380]

I also thought Savant's review was a good one, he was just emphasising the difficult nature of the film before going into more detail where he argues that it is an important piece of work.

Instead of a dungeon, the victims are tied up and staked out in a sandlot outfitted like a Roman torture arena. The 'torture master' is even dressed in a perverse costume, like something out of an ancient epic. There's no apparent audience. The victims are held tight while they're raped and mutilated, and killed with knives, ropes, and hot irons. It's circus of horrors complete with unbearably realistic makeup effects.

The clincher is that the libertine observers are fifty yards away, watching from behind windows. They use opera glasses to view close-ups of the worst atrocities. At that distance, with loud music playing, they can't hear the cries and screams from the arena. Death is placed at a discreet remove for the comfort of the observer -- like Television with the audio turned down. This perverse setup reminds of the voyeuristic horrors of Psycho or Peeping Tom, "civilized" genre movies constructed on sick ideas. Because we also are morbidly curious, because we also want to see, Pasolini implicates us in the Sadean experience. We're locked into the horrible beauty of the images, the faces of the victims in extremis and the leering, horrid faces of the libertines -- and Pasolini gives us no "out." There's nowhere else to turn, no resolution and no escape.

I would suggest though that the one thing he missed in this description is the way that the observers are exchanging positions during the final scene - each one taking a turn at observing from 'ground level', performing the torture and then viewing at a distance, allowing each one of them the opportunity to experience the pleasure of their acts from various distances as well as bonding the libertines together in their shared blood sacrifices.

To push Erickson's analogy further it would be similar to watching the shower scene from Psycho on your television, then being given the opportunity to sit in the motel room while the murder was occuring, then being able to wield the knife on Marion yourself. You get to be both the performer on a stage playing to the Gods and the audience member watching from a comfortable distance knowing that this is all being done for your benefit - a dark view of an 'interactive' culture?

[swo17]

I liked the observation that modern-day 'torture-chic fans' might not think much of it.

I considered putting this in the customer review thread, but this is more scary to me than rediculous:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as shocking as I was hoping, didn't make up for it in it's profundity

I'll admit right away, I was mostly interested in Salo because of a curiosity with exploitation films. I was also aware that Bonacelli altered Sade's work so that it was taking place in fascist Italy, but all I was really expecting from this alteration was the use of shock and exploitation as a critique of fascism (which is essentially all I found it to be as others have already elaborated). I feel I should also add that I'm an 18 year old college student who is not a huge movie-buff, but who does like to push his limits.

So with this in mind, Salo was somewhat of a disappointment for me. I found the plot to be weak considering the length of the movie (almost two hours). Essentially, a few prostitutes tell stories of their personal encounters with various libertines, while the aristocratic libertines present exercise their whims on a group of teens that have been taken captive (this is literally the whole story). This may be expected though as Sade's actual work seems more focused on shocking his audience than telling them a real story. This may be an issue for those who really need a plot to follow, maybe not for those who just want "torture porn" (as Sade might have intended his work to be).

So moving on to the "torture-porn" aspect of the movie. The "sick" moments did exist but they were relatively short compared to the amount of dialogue and even silence at times (which maybe was there to exemplify the teens anxiety while waiting to see what their fate was/ the mortification of their identities, however it's taken, either way I found it a tad slow with little build-up).

I found the worst scenes to be a girl having to eat her own excrement, and a few very short (maybe 10 seconds each) scenes at the end of the movie such as an eyeball removed with a knife, branding a boys nipples, scalping a girl, and putting a flame to a boys penis (and besides all this the movie has a fair amount of sexual degradation). Yes, it had it's sick moments, but overall I found Salo to be far less shocking than I was expecting from what I heard was "the 8th sickest movie ever made". So if "torture porn" and exploitation films are your thing, I'd say this movie is worth a watch just because it crosses a lot more barriers than most movies and does contain an ample amount of exploitation. One should keep in mind though that it has a kind of slow pace and the first 3/4th of the movie is mostly degradation with little to no death or blood. The pinnacle moment of "torture porn" in Salo is found in the last 5-10 minutes.

Maybe I'm just jaded and desensitized and don't find this movie as horrible as it actually is, but I'm definitely not troubled or really even that shaken having seen this movie. In fact, I find animal cruelty videos such as meetyourmeat.com (real snuff films?) to be much more disturbing, exploitative, and just generally hard to watch. Salo certainly wasn't bad, and I don't mind owning the non-criterion edition for the $8 I paid, but it definitely wasn't great, and it can't be shown to many of my friends due to it's graphic and disturbing nature (my girlfriend wouldn't watch it with me). In terms of rewatchability, I probably won't watch it again because I just found it sort of dull, but if you're watching Salo to find meaning in Boncelli's link between Sade's work and fascism then I'd say it definitely has rewatch potential.

In short: Worth a view if you're into exploitation films, critiques on fascism (that embody the aforementioned), or just want to add another Criterion selection to your repertoire (still keeping the aforementioned in mind). Other than that, this movie probably isn't for you.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Does he detail the atrocities in that review just to warn people off or bring them in? I wish I could bring Swift back from the grave to review Salo.

[luridedith]

It has 100% the courage of its convictions and consequently a weight that nasty-but-dismissable shite like Wolf Creek can't hope to match.

I don't want to throw this thread off course but Wolf Creek shouldn't be so easily lumped in with its empty "torture-porn" contemporaries, it deserves better. The director used the mean-spirited violence as an attack on Australian culture's tendency to glorify "ockerism"/anti-intellectualism and the "aussie battler" archetype - turning the lovably dumb crocodile-hunter-type that foreigners think we are on its head. As an Australian so used to homogenous home-grown entertainment, I loved it. Its our Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I'll defend it to the death.

Back to Salo and that Amazon review, I must saw that jaded gorehounds are the worst kind of film fan. IMDB boards are full of them - those who measure every film by its reputation or disturbing factor and if it doesn't fill a particular quota, its utterly worthless. Nothing EVER seems to satisfy them and they use that fact as some kind of weird bragging mechanism. They are the most boring and predictable people on the planet.

[pianocrash]

Reading that review was like reading an alien's description of planet earth, or like reading an autopsy report (not with my girlfriend!), or like someone describing to me how sausage is made, but not exactly "why". But I suppose he spilled the beans about the "worst scenes" in part to help himself understand what he had just watched (not with his girlfriend), and in order to aid any future purchasers that don't prefer some grain of subtlety, meaning, or the messages buried within the film. I kept thinking of the kid in Benny's Video, but I fear that Skylar Goldman would have been less impressed with that film than Salo, let alone see any parallels with his own viewing habits and/or preferences toward "torture porn". Weepin' for the future over here...

[Darth Lavender]

Your comments on Wolf Creek are interesting _ I haven't seen it but in the wake of older Oz exploitation like the Brian Trenchard-Smith shockers (like Turkey Shoot, which is hilarious in its own way) I doubted there was any space for subtlety in OZ-genre films.

And getting back to Salo, surely Shock Records will lodge an appeal with the Review Board? This film has become such a litmus test for the anti-intellectualism of Oz Public Life.

Have you written a letter, yet, telling the OFLC what you think of their decision? (Politely)

That's actually something I'd recommend to any Australian. It was a close vote of 7 to 6, and these censorship boards tend to base their decisions on a surprisingly small number of complaints. Maybe we can even start a petition?

[Narshty]

Reading that review was like reading an alien's description of planet earth [...] Weepin' for the future over here...

I don't find that review especially unsettling - Salo is such a depersonalised film that I can imagine it (for the most part) just not reaching some people. Indeed, some people just have a built-in or self-developed "if it's not real, it doesn't bother me" blanket-rule mentality towards films, which I can believe without professing to actually understand or sympathise with.

Incidentally, The DVD Clinic

The reviewer gives it a half-hearted "ugh" and seems to think Morricone composed all the music. He also indulges in some rather unpleasant and baffling "us and them" rhetoric:

There is a peculiar crowd out there, however, that will endlessly praise Pasolini’s curtain call as “art”—the same dangerous brigade who champion GG Allin and, ugh, Jackson Pollock as “geniuses.”

[Tommaso]

Pasolini, influenced by the great Italian writers (he previously adapted the works of Boccaccio and Chaucer) and his own masochistic mind

Apart from the fact that Chaucer hardly was an Italian writer, I love how the reviewer (probably out of complete helplessness) tries to explain away the film by insinuating that it is simply a product of Paso's mental disturbance. Not as bad as that amazon reviewer, though. I really pity the girlfriend.

[planetjake]

9 bids!

#-o

"God bless your crooked little heart ... " --Tom Waits

[swo17]

There are people on Amazon Marketplace asking as much as $1000 for the OOP Criterion.

[Rupert Pupkin]

There are people on Amazon Marketplace asking as much as $1000 for the OOP Criterion.

I don't understand why the OOP has still an interest since the re-release version is exactly the same in terms of "uncut" (it still misses the missing footage which is only on the BFI version)- Moreover the re-release has a better image quality now. So why still an interest in the OOP version ?

[domino harvey]

[MichaelB]

Mind you, asking $1,000 on Amazon Marketplace doesn't mean anyone's actually going to pay it...

[Darth Lavender]

Actually, the high prices for a rare, mediocre, but famous DVD make about as much sense as rare (usually 'flawed') stamps. Although you can take that statement either way.

[pianocrash]

Mind you, asking $1,000 on Amazon Marketplace doesn't mean anyone's actually going to pay it...

But for 25 more dollars, you could have purchased a sealed copy of Living Colour's Vivid, in the longbox!

[aox]

I was wondering if Ebert ever reviewed this film? After a cursory google attempt, I don't think he has. It would be interesting to hear his thoughts.