Rambling critique on Salo

Warning: This post is ALL business.

After only watching some of a poor quality unsubtitled bootleg of Salo last year and being kind of morbidly fascinated by it, I've finally watched the whole thing translated on Criterion Collection's new DVD. Before I get into any analysis, I have to say that it was an unexpectedly beautiful looking movie, with very classy and colorful cinematography and top-notch production design. The only other Pasolini movie I've seen (Teorema) was pretty bland looking (and boring to boot), so I was expecting this to be the same, but it really is an attractively shot movie, ironic considering its uncomfortable onscreen content.

The movie doesn't really have any sort of plot to speak of, apart from its premise, which even then is simple. In 1944 Nazi occupied Italy, four middle-aged powerful, wealthy, and evil aristocrats (who are never given names apart from formal titles like "excellency" and "lord") kidnap a bunch of teenagers, chosen by their attractiveness, and lock themselves up in a lavish mansion, along with a few close, and equally cruel, brothel madames, for a celebration of perversity and debauchery, all at the expense of their victims. The characters progress through stages of hell, which include the "circle of obsessions", the "circle of shit", and finally the "circle of blood", each hosted by a different aging prostitute, who sits in a big hall and romantically tells hideous and unusual stories of various unsavory sexual practices, which in turn influences the libertines to act out these tales on their teenage sex slaves.

For me what is interesting about the four libertines is that they consider themselves true fascists and are obviously part of the fascist government in Italy, yet a lot of their actions go against their own political party. They set-up their own puppet society in the mansion, with its own class system (the victims being the citizens and themselves the self-appointed leaders), and they have a collection of strict rules that the victims must silently obey, but their rules glorify homosexuality (something hated by the nazis/fascists of the era) and sodomy. So these men are essentially hypocrites, saying they adhere to their fascist ideology, but continually going against it. The mansion becomes some sort of weird reverse-fascist state, where abnormal and destructive sex becomes the norm, but the strict rule and class system still applies. The victims are all either in the exact same clothes or completely naked the whole movie, as a way to show the conformity that is thrown upon them. There's a blase additude to all of the terrible things done over the course of the movie, with the fascists barely ever pleased or satisfied by their vicious actions, and the victims accepting their own imprisonment and helplessness. The libertines seem to be men who don't even understand themselves, and use their position and power as a way to explore their violent and vile sexual appetites in a sexually repressive society, but it beings them no real joy, and their tempers rise into frequent brutal violence.

The libertines also seem to be experimenting with their victims. The first few guys captured don't becomes the sex slaves, but are given positions of power instead. They are rounded up and taken, and then the next scene shows them in full military garb, acting out their first orders. Only one of them rebels, and he is later instantly killed. It's disturbing how fast the others, when not in the lower tier of the little society, become just as corrupt as the adults. They also forcibly marry eachothers daughters in one of the opening scenes, as a way to bind their fates together, and then throughout the rest of the movie, the daughters are equated with the regular teenaged victims and are stripped, humiliated, raped, and eventually killed.

The storytelling prostitutes always have the most hideously fake and souless smiles stretched across their weathered faces as they casually sit around chatting, always dressed in the classiest gowns, while never-ending abuse takes place around them. Their vulgar tales of their pasts show that they themselves were corrupted and abused at a young age, most likely unwillingly at first. One of the women tells of her first sexual experience, where her professor ejaculated all over her face when she was like 7, and then how she became a prostitute. The actresses who play these characters can actually be kind of funny, especially the first storyteller who dances around and speaks in different voices and plays it up big time for amusing, albeit uncomfortable results; the other two, especially the last one who tells the creepy torture tale (who I recognized from a couple Fellini movies) are less funny and more disturbing. The women specifically tell these tales to influence the activities that go on over the course of the 120 days, so they probably are reliving past experiences through the new set of victims. This is also very circular (just like how the movie passes through circles of hell), as the victims of the past are now the oppressors, and by the end of the movie, a couple of the victims themselves become fascist and are saved in the end from the tortures inflicted on the rest, last seen drinking wine and socializing with the libertines and storytellers, while the others are tied up in the other room, awaiting their deaths. The film's abrupt non-ending seems to suggest that what took place is something that never truly ends. Stuff like this does happen, and has since happened. I read an interesting review that compared Salo to Abu Gharib, and that in the writer's mind, the film gained new signifigance because of it; that what we see here, while fictional, isn't too far from the truth.

Now, I've never really liked the argument that because something horrible exists, that warrants a graphic depiction of it. You can make that argument for a lot of really trashy disgusting movies, like Cannibal Holocaust or something. And I've read a lot of reviews that condemn this movie as pointless trash, but with the pretense of being art. But when I watched it, I didn't at all think the movie was gratuitous prententious arty junk. I feel like the message is a little muddy overall, and any point it's trying to make can dissapear from the intense reaction a lot of people get from it. And while I found much of it bothersome, I was much more intrigued by it. Some people get too bent up over the gross scenes (which are actually all pretty brief and about as tasteful as tasteless material can be) and seem to miss a lot of cool scenes and details.

There's this mysterious woman who plays the piano during the storytelling scenes who has almost no dialogue, and the music she plays during the earlier parts in the movie are joyous and upbeat, then it becomes slower and more somber, and by the end she's playing really creepy minimalist music. Then she plays one last upbeat tune before she throws herself out of a window. There is also some interesting ironic use of religious statues in parts of the mansion, and during the wedding feast of shit scene, everyone is dressed in elegant clothes, sitting at long tables with bottles of wine and flowers on them, while they eat turds off of china plates with forks. It's a more interesting, bizarre, and sometimes darkly humorous movie than people give it credit for. I also liked this bewildering part during this mock wedding ceremony where the libertines dress up as women and marry their favorite man in the group, and the pianist (hilariously carrying an accordion) does some weird comedy skit in French with one of the prostitutes, and then they start screaming, then they start laughing uncontrollably. I mean, I don't get it, but it's just so strange...

I dunno, I just kind of jumped around a lot and put some thoughts down, but I thought in terms of graphic content it was a little over-hyped, but that it was a lot more interesting and thought-provoking than I expected. Watching it as "the most effed up movie EVAR" is stupid because it has a lot more too it than just empty controversy. I wouldn't go so far to say that it's a great movie, but I did think it was really good, and pretty much unlike any movie out there. I had been led to believe by reviews I had read that the movie was a cold, sparse, emotionless, disgusting movie, but it turned out to be a lot more colorful, weirder, and fascinating. That's not to say it isn't messed up and disturbing, because it is, the final 10 minutes especially. Ugh, there's this particularly gross scalping during the final torture orgy that is really awful, and there are a handful of nasty scenes here and there, but none of them are really quite as bad as the hype says, and you can find movies that are much more consistently graphic than this. But this isn't a gore/gross-out flick, so it coming up shorter on that stuff than I expected (and was scared) to see worked in its favor. Though I'm hardly a judge on the matter; I can pretty much watch anything by this point without being fazed, so maybe the hype is right, this is unwatchable, and it should NEVER be seen. But I can say I thought it was a genuinely well-made and interesting movie, denser and stranger than I anticipated.