In Salò, his last and most controversial film, Pier Paolo Pasolini explores the relationship between Fascism and sadism: “The whole film,” Pasolini wrote, “with its monstrous, almost unspeakable atrocities, is offered as a huge Sadian metaphor for the Nazi/Fascists' ‘detachment' in their ‘crimes against humanity.'” Pasolini transposed the Marquis de Sade's novel 120 Days of Sodom from the 18th century to 1944, when a short-lived Fascist puppet government was set up in Salò, Northern Italy. In the film, four Fascists--a duke, the President, a magistrate and a bishop--bring to a remote villa a crew of handsome soldiers and a number of beautiful adolescent boys and girls whom they have had kidnapped from the town. While aging prostitutes recount erotic memories to excite them, the Fascists act out their sexual perversions on the young captives; these range from rape to scatalogical cruelties and lead finally to torture and murder. The film is divided into three “circles”: the “Circle of Madness,” the “Circle of Excrement,” and the “Circle of Blood.”
Pasolini portrays these scenes in stark, graphic detail. In so doing, he maintains a kind of distance, a false or emotionless quality. Perhaps more than anything, it is this quality that many critics have found unbearable in the film. Yet Pasolini could hardly have chosen a better way to express his horror at his subject. Stressing his “absolute fidelity” to de Sade's text and characters (“even the narrative structure is identical: it is obviously synthesized”), Pasolini noted, “de Sade's characters...behave toward their victims exactly as the Nazi-Fascists did to theirs: they think of them as objects in their possession and from the outset destroy all possibility of establishing a human relationship with them.”
As another angle on Salò, it has been noted that Pasolini chose, for his lead characters, actors who were almost exact look-alikes for leading Christian-Democrat politicians.
Please note: Salò is recommended for adults only, and viewers should be aware that it contains many graphic and disturbing scenes.