Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (or, Say it again in English please)

There haven't been many films more controversial than Salò, or The 120 Days Of Sodom, Piers Paulo Pasolini's final work. I don't know of any other film that has been banned in Australia then released then banned all over again. Australia has a penchant for banning films, some pretty good films at that. Sure, my mother told me that I couldn't watch "Dawn Of The Dead", "The Toxic Avenger" and "Re-Animator" but the poor bastard Queenslanders were told they weren't allowed to watch them by their government. The Queensland government even deemed "A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors" too much for those delicate minds.

Of course, the controversies over recent films such as "Ken Park", "Irreversible" and "Baise-Moi" have simply proved to excellent (and relatively cheap) advertising for films of varying quality. So, how securely does Salò stand on this pedestal of infamy? Well, we flocked to our "reception" room tonight to settle in to watch it. It certainly wasn't our love of classic Italian political allegory that drew us in, it was a love of laughing at tacky psuedo-horrors and the parochial bureaucrats who banned a film for something so obviously silly. The night didn't exactly go to plan.

Pasolini based the film on a text written by the Marquis de Sade whilst he was imprisoned for some unseemly act in La Bastille. In De Sade's tale, four "libertines" are regaled with peversely erotic stories by four prostitues while they prevail themselves on eighteen youths they have kidnapped for their sexual "delight". Pasolini transports the story to the "Salò Republic", the seat of power in during the German occupation of northen Italy. Pasolini spent part of his childhood here and his experiences obviously "fucked him up big time", for want of a better expression.

The film has plenty to shock abundant nudity, rape, paedophilia, homosexuality, scalping, excrement, flagellation. While not as disturbing as it surely must have been when it was released in 1976, "Salò still manages to fill the soul with dread. It must be noted here that the disconcerting effect of bad lip synching brought on by lag in the digital copy we were watching as well as the fact that the subtitles were appearing fully 15 seconds after the characters spoke made for an almost indecipherable mess of emphatic Italian so the nuances of the plot were difficult to grasp.

The tale stands as a sickening exploration of power and the Fascist mindset. The actual images are not all that disturbing (given that we now get to sit through the gratuitousness of new millenium horror) but there is an arch "artiness" to the whole affair brought on by static camerawork and almost Vermeer-lik mise-en-scène. The distance this creates forces the audience into the role of uncomfortable voyeur. It is obvious that there is intended meaning for everything that goes on here, each depraved image denotes something beyond the frame of the film. The masters' philosophising makes this abundantly clear but there is a definite, and most probably intentional, inaccessibility to the conclusive meaning of the symbols. The feast of faeces was apparently Pasolini's comment on the emerging fast food industry. This is an art film through and though.

Ultimately, Salò is an engaging and complex film. It is classic Italian political allegory and deserves to be remembered as such, not as "that banned film". Ironically, Salò damns the control of the few and the misuse of power, an important theme that merits exploration yet it was shut down (twice) by people in power who couldn't see past the flesh. I think there is something in that for all of us!

Tags: movie review, Pasolini