Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma

Plot synopsis:
In 1944 in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist-occupied portion of Italy, four wealthy men of power, the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President, agree to marry each other's daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. They recruit four teenage boys to act as guards (dressed with uniforms of Decima Flottiglia MAS) and four young soldiers (called "studs", "cockmongers" or "fuckers"), who are chosen because of their big penises. They then kidnap nine young men and nine young women and take them to a palace near Marzabotto. Accompanying them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, who recount arousing stories for the men, who sadistically exploit their victims.
During the many days at the palace, the four men devise increasingly abhorrent tortures and humiliations for their own pleasure. During breakfast, the daughters enter the dining hall naked to serve food. One of the studs trips and rapes a daughter in front of the crowd, which laughs at her cries of pain. Intrigued, the President moons several slaves before prompting the stud to perform anal sex on him and the Duke sings 'Sul Ponte di perati' and everybody sings also. A girl who tries to escape is slain and a middle-aged prostitute continues with her story. Two victims are forced to marry. The ceremony is interrupted when the Duke fondles several victims and prostitutes. At the end, the bride and groom are forced to fondle each other and the men rape them to stop them from having sex with each other. During this, the Magistrate engages with the Duke in three-way intercourse.
Another day, the victims are forced to act like dogs. When one of the victims, Lamberto, refuses, the Magistrate whips him and tortures the President's daughter by tricking her into eating food containing nails. Non-penetrative sex gives way to coprophagia. As Signora Maggi tells her story, the President notices that one of the studs has an erection and fondles him. Another stud uses a female victim's hand to masturbate himself. Signora Maggi relates how she killed her mother, and Renata cries, remembering the murder of her own mother. The Duke, sexually excited at the sound of her cries, begins verbally abusing her. The Duke orders the guards and studs to undress her. During this, she begs God for death, and the Duke punishes her by defecating and forcing her to eat his feces. The President leaves to masturbate. Later, the other victims are presented with a meal of human feces. During a search for the victim with the most beautiful buttocks, Franco is picked and promised death in the future.
Later, there is a black mass-like wedding between the studs and the men of power. The men angrily order the children to laugh, but they are too grief-stricken to do so. The Pianist and Signora Vaccari tell jokes to make the victims laugh. The wedding ceremony ensues with each man of power exchanging rings with a stud. After the wedding, the Bishop is sodomized by his stud. The Bishop then leaves to examine the captives in their rooms, where they start systematically betraying each other: Claudio reveals that Graziella is hiding a photograph, Graziella reveals that Eva and Antiniska are having a secret sexual affair, and Ezio, a collaborator and the black servant are shot dead after being found having sex, but not before Ezio makes a defiant socialist salute. Victim Umberto Chessari is appointed to replace Ezio. Toward the end, the remaining victims are called out to determine which of them will be punished. Graziella is spared due to her betrayal of Eva, and Rino is spared due to his submissive relationship with the Duke. Those who are called are given a blue ribbon and sentenced to a painful death. The victims huddle together and cry and pray in the bathroom. They are then tortured and murdered through methods such as branding, hanging, scalping, burning, and having their tongues and eyes cut out, as each libertine takes his turn to watch as voyeur. The soldiers shake hands and bid farewell, and the Pianist commits suicide due to her grief.
The film's final shot is of two young soldiers, who had witnessed and collaborated in all the atrocities, dancing a simple waltz together.

Tags: avant garde, cruelty, murder, bleak, thought-provoking, cult, sadist, violence, insanity, humor, satire, tragedy, storytelling

Review:
Pier Paolo Pasolini, as is well known, was murdered not long after he finished work on this, his most audacious and confrontational film, yet even the most casual viewing of SALO begs the question - had he not been murdered, would he have taken his own life anyway?
Every sequence, every shot and practically every moment of this film is so burdened with despair, barely concealed rage and a towering disgust with the human race, one gets the impression that Pasolini was barely hanging onto life - and any attendant shreds of hope - by his fingernails.
Although ostensibly an adaptation of one of DeSade's most depraved works channeled through the horrifying excesses of the Second World War with the Fascist ruling classes as its (authentically vile) villains, SALO also contains a lot of contemporary criticism - Pasolini hated the modern world, and explained the stomach-churning 'banquet of s**t' as a none-too-subtle attack on the encroaching global domination of the fast food chains.
(The scenes of sexual excess can similarly be read as a despairing attack on the permissive society - those who come to SALO expecting titillation or B-movie sleaze will be sorely disappointed.) Beyond the nihilistic content, which has been well documented elsewhere, the film has an overall mood that seems to have been engineered to make the viewer thoroughly depressed.
Yet, you will wish you could forget them.The film is about a group of rich Fascists during WWII-Nazi Occupied Italy, where they kidnap a group of 18 youngsters, allowing only physically perfect specimins to stay, and subject them to various forms of mental, physical and sexual torture over the next 120 Days.
Just when you think what you are seeing can't get worse, it does, ten-fold.What makes Salo so brutally shocking and disturbing is its uncompromised and blunt way of showing the acts of horror.
Upon realizing this, one also realizes how the horrible acts shown in the film are possible, and it's a terrible realization.Salo continues to descend until at the end, when we are taken to the punishing grounds, where various rule breakers are tortured and murdered.
This entire film experience MUST be viewed as a symbolic, emotional "explanation" of what it was like to live under Nazi/Fascist rule (in this case), and how an otherwise normal, decent society could be turned into lunatics and sub-animals.
We are given no insight into the lives of these children, while we are shown at great length the heads of state personal histories and sadistic proclivities.Salo has stood the test of time because of it's unflinching portrayal of human violence and idealism, and the fact that, as the Criterion collection states: "Moral redemption may be nothing but a myth." Be warned: for many, Salo is a film not easily shaken off after a single viewing..
Pasolini was outraged and disappointed with the human-condition, and Italian politics had become chaos--leading Sergio Leone to remark at the time that, "Italian politics have become ridiculous." The scenario of Salo is fairly-simple: a group of Italian-fascists retreat to a palace in Northern Italy (where there was a great-deal of support for Italian fascism and the Monarch) with a group of sixteen boys and girls.
Many reviewers have commented that this movie is powerful and that everyone should see it because it gives you access to true feelings of disgust and guilt about man's inhumanity to man, especially during times of anarchistic, despotic, or fascist rule.
If you need this movie to understand how terrible the crimes visited on people by the fascists, Nazi and otherwise, during WWII were, then Pasolini's only success is that he has demonstrated just how sick and desensitized our global society has become.Stark brutality has its value as a tool for demonstrating the full force of certain horrible events.
At the core, Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, is interesting as a concept, from which it was taken from Sade's novel - a group of f*cked up fascists during the end of world war two capture some young boys and girls and force them to go under sexual and mental tortures.
I can't recommend Salo except for extreme, die-hard film buffs and for nihilistic types (and maybe for those interested in understanding the nature of fascism), and for those looking for what's worse after Gibson's POTC.
(Pasolini's political enemies at the time were not fascists at all, but the Christian Democrats)...Furthermore it is NOT a defense of Sade, but an apology for his earlier writings and films which mythicized acts of violence and glorified them as the pure, unconscious, pre-verbal expression of the subproletariat.
Although Pasolini uses De Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" as scaffolding and as a pointed commentary, "Saló" is actually based on real events that happened in the Republic of Saló in Northern Italy, where a group of wealthy fascists abducted a large group of young men and women, went on to debase them, and after they were done with them they killed them.
I just accidentally watched this movie in a small cinema, but I think there are two groups of mentally sick people, the first is who make films like this, the second is who enjoy them and feel some exceptional artistic deepness..
I've also read that this movie, maybe in the same vein as the former, is also a snuff film that the director, Pasolini, put together in a deliberate attempt to offend people who watch it to its conclusion.
As I have often said, "Salò" is the movie that changed my relation with films, when I became conscious of one of cinema's most important characteristics, called "impression of reality", and learned how different film languages, with all their techniques, effects and punctuations, can manipulate people's emotions.I believe that since Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote "Teorema" (the long poem), he was convinced that sex was the most effective weapon against bourgeoisie, as had been stated by people like Wilhelm Reich or indirectly by the Marquis de Sade, a bourgeois himself (please, correct me if I am wrong).
"Salò" seemed to be his definite demonstration of such assumption, although I wonder how would have been his next film, "Porno-Teo-Kolossal", an erotic-theological super-spectacle he was preparing with playwright Eduardo de Filippo and actor Ninetto Davoli (notice a hint of the reverential in the frame's compositions of "Salò", which resemble religious tableaux.)As a reaction to a consumerist society sunk in terrorism and political crisis as was Italy in the 1970s, Pasolini created this parable of power, using Brechtian techniques and taking full advantage of the depth of field, to shock audiences accostumed to as he said- "cowboys and Indians and Sophia Loren" (who reportedly left the movie house in revulsion).
It's not easy to grasp in a single viewing all the connotations of a film that was attacked by both right and left, a movie about ideological perversion, genocidal sadism, pandering masochism and the transformation of human bodies into objects, a motion picture that addresses the fascist we all have inside, and that - after so much pessimism - gives us an image of "hope" (sort of) in the final scene in which a young guard teaches another one to dance!Impressed by a film that had an essential bibliography in its credits, I was in awe in 1975.
At that time, I was the program director of the University of Panamá cinema and I rescued the film, which was exhibited for a month in the campus.A couple of years ago I heard a wise final word about Pasolini's masterpiece, from a friend, filmmaker Orlando Senna.
But "Salò or the 120 days of Sodom" changes an entire thought that i had created of Pasolini.This unpleasant movie about the human coldness is based on a story written by Sade.
The story is about four powerful and fascist men that, with four former prostitutes they kidnap a number of adolescent men and women to torture them sadistically.I didn't want to watch the movie the first time that the opportunity appeared, i decided that it was better to wait and to investigate to understand the movie well.
When i saw it the impact was hard but not traumatic."Salò or the 120 days of Sodom" can be seen by any person that wants to see it, this movie is not exclusive for intellectual people, but the person that wants to see it should investigate first about the fascism, of the life of Pasolini, of Sade and until the same Dante Alighieri.
I think that if people don't take these steps first, the movie will be superficially view and it wont be seen by their meaning.This criticizes by Pasolini toward the war it is a perfect metaphor of the fascism in Italy and at the same time a summarized chronicle of what this artist lived time behind.
It is a work that many times, for alone to see the superficial thing and not the meaning, is not well interpreted."Salò or the 120 days of Sodom" is not a movie to enjoy, it is a movie to make us think on that sometimes us, the people, should be it that supposedly are, human.
For people without this background, "Salò" appears as a museum of random historical absurdity, merging the Marquis De Sade's stories and the fascist practices of Mussolini that accompanied the film director's whole life."Salò" urges the audience to watch behind the pictures, thus behind the signs.
What director Pier Paolo Pasolini does with 'Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom' is making a point a lot of people already understand.
Sex and violence and the desire to power are very much connected, Pasolini thinks and shows.The story itself exists out of nine boys and nine girls being physically and mentally tortured, most of the time sexually.
The stories told in the film are more disturbing than most of the things shown, and the only really disgusting scene deals with excrement and eating.What Pasolini does, one thing I particularly admired, is show human nature in the most evil way.
The metaphor is insultingly obvious and childish, and to be honest, while watching this film nothing would have made me happier than punching the director in the face for being a tasteless, talentless, puerile little child for thinking this piece of cinema excrement could be considered art in any way.
Supporters (read, pseudo-intellectual art snobs who have no actual concept of art) of this film go "Ahh but there are naked children everywhere and they get raped and the director is edgy and he thinks fascism is bad" is enough to justify the existence of this mediocre porn.
"Salo or 120 Days of Sodom" (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini is the film that completely lives up to its reputation of one of or even THE most disturbing, depressing, cruel, and unwatchable ever made.
As for Pasolini's work, I've loved and admired every one of his films I've seen before I decided to see Salo.
I don't know but it is unforgettable whether you like it or not and it was made by a brilliant master of cinema.It is truly one of its kind films, and sometimes I think it is great, but more often - why Pasolini made it?
I still hear the cry of one of the girls-victims in the end of the film, "Why did God abandon us?!!" In the world where God turned his face away from His creatures, horror and degradation of these proportions are possible, and they may and do repeat over and over again in different periods of time, in different countries and continents.Pasolini's last film is not the one I will ever want to see again but I believe it should be seen at least once by any thinking viewer..
I almost want to say that I made a mistake in seeing this film because it is the single most depressing and disturbing film I think I've ever seen.It takes place in WWII fascist Italy and deals with a group of senior members of government rounding up 18 young men and women to take them to a secluded palace with a plan to torture and sexually degrade them.
It is true that a great work of art is inexhaustible and that many of us would benefit from added information about it; in the case of Pasolini, however, the "explanations" are considerably more interesting than the work itself, and this is particularly true of SALO, a film of notorious reputation.With SALO, Pasolini very freely adapts de Sade into a tale of young innocents kidnapped for use as sexual toys by the 'powerful but depraved' during World War II.
Of all the movies I've seen, and I've seen a lot, Salò is by far the most disturbing, disgusting, and utterly powerful film.
Having used IMDb as a research tool (and a way to kill time) over the last 4 years, I have never felt the need to sign up an account and post a review; there is an abundance of intelligent and articulate movie buffs who know what they are talking about.My hats off to every last one of them.People interested in this movie should know that "..just because you can, doesn't mean you should".Given the opportunity to create a masterpiece, adding to a very narrow genre, the director fails miserably on so many levels.The characters are poorly developed and have no depth.
This inspired(?) Passolini to make this movie,based on the Marquis de Sade novel.The viewer is sucked into this vulgar and sexually explicit movie.It is hard to imagine what the cast and crew must have gone through making this movie,but the acting is surprisingly good and focussed on shocking the viewer.The people who say that this movie is too much are right,it is.But that doesn't mean that it should be boycotted.Like I already said,this isn't cheap porn.it is based on a terrible time in the history of the world and although the story isn't based on facts,it wouldn't surprise me if this really happened.Those Nazi's and fascits were REALLY sick!It is impossible for me to give this movie a high grade,not only because of the explicit shots but also and even more so because of the lack of storyline and originality.Oh yes,"Salo" is very original in it's own right but the scenes are sort of copies of each other.Just look at the 'stories' by the old ladies.These scenes are countless and most of the time the same.Yet,the repetition of these scenes make it even more shocking.
Overall,not a movie that you watch with your friends on a saturday night with beer and nuts.But "Salo" has a message to everyone who thinks that war and oppression is just about shooting and bombing.War and oppression also means that there are things going on that are easily forgotten by the people,but nevertheless really happened.
Things I would've never expected from a film that has been banned and outlawed in several different countries.When compared to recent torture porn films, or even those that date back several years or decades ago like Cannibal Holocaust or the distasteful and horrendous August Underground, it is shocking to stumble upon a film that features sodomy, sexual humiliation, torture, manipulation, cruelty, depravity, fascism, totalitarianism, graphic rape, homosexuality, and voyeurism all in the same film.
The film, adapted from the Marquis DeSade's 'The 120 Days' is set during the final days of fascism in Italy, during 1944,when a group of Fascists take a batch of newly arrested Communist youths to a swanky house in the countryside, and subject them to four months of some of the most de humanizing,degrading forms of humiliation,torture & eventual horrific deaths that one could hope to see on screen.
Yes. Then, Salò has to be the greatest film on history.Watch the movie if you truly want to, sure it's shocking, but every great work of art is as well.Ed..
After seeing most of Pasolini's films, and liking or even admiring nearly every one, I still don't understand why he had to make this horrible and disgusting movie..
Like all Pasolini's films, 'Salo' is literally monotonous, one tone (think of 'Gospel', 'Teorema') where a single idea is carried unswervingly through to its conclusion, without beginning or end, without variation.
The Marquis de Sade had already been adapted :the last segment of Bunuel's "l'âge d'or' for instance;There's also Vadim's farce "le vice et la vertu " which shares something with Pasolini's work:both take place during WW2.As I cannot say something nice about Vadim.."Salo" came aside as a shock in 1975-76 when it was released:it's strange Pasolini should make such a desperate work after his trilogy full of joie de vivre ("Decameron","Canterbury"" mille e una notte").The darkest sequence of "mille e una nota" -a young adolescent killed by his gay lover because it's "written"-might be a vague clue but it does not explain this extreme pessimism."Salo" ,although it takes place during WW2 is not the kind of movie you leave ,giving a sigh of relief:"fortunately,it would not happen nowadays!"WW2 and facism are only alibis:what you see on the screen happens every day .It's not a movie for peeping toms ,do not expect to get an eyeful:this is not a movie to give you pleasure,but to cause you pain,to make you scream,to make you wonder why man can stoop so low.It's impossible to leave this movie unharmed;a lot of sequences will force you to look away.Pasolini leaves no hope to his audience;only rebellion attempts (the girl who hides a photo in her bed,the two girls making love,the boy sleeping with a black maid,the two boys dancing together)are short escapes from a God-forsaken world;and these rebellions are thwarted by informing."Salo" is a movie which I recommend but only to these with a strong stomach;definitely NOT the one to begin with if you want to discover PP Pasolini:when I saw the movie in 1976,I almost threw up;As far the last third (the tortures) is concerned,my memory  censored it:I did not remember it when I saw the film again 25 years later..
Just as De Sade's book tells you more about the man who wrote it than the work itself, so too do I think less of SALO as a film than the end-product of the man who made it..