'Salò' on Criterion: 1975 film still a shocker
A SECOND LOOK
Director Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed after finishing the film, which weaves Marquis de Sade writings with Mussolini fascism.
"SALÒ, OR the 120 Days of Sodom," the final film by Pier Paolo Pasolini, owes its considerable notoriety not just to the unrelenting parade of degradation and torture that it serves up on screen but also to an unfortunately resonant act of off-screen brutality. On Nov. 2, 1975, just weeks after the movie was completed, Pasolini's mutilated body was discovered in a vacant lot outside Rome. Police investigations concluded that he had been killed by a 17-year-old boy he had attempted to pick up.
A lapsed Catholic and a gay Marxist, Pasolini was the provocative sum of his contradictions. He was a true polymath -- a filmmaker, poet, novelist and playwright -- and a habitual firebrand, an outspoken public intellectual who made no secret of his homosexuality or his taste for teenage rough trade. And as with so many artists who die violently or before their time, his demise quickly became the prism through which his work -- "Salò" in particular -- was viewed. Michelangelo Antonioni remarked that Pasolini had been "the victim of his own characters."
More than three decades later, it finally might be possible to free "Salò" from the shadow of Pasolini's grisly death. The alleged killer recanted his confession a few years ago; many people now believe that the murder was politically motivated, undermining the once prevalent view that it represented something of a death wish on Pasolini's part.
As for the film itself, reissued this week by the Criterion Collection in a two-disc edition richly supplemented with essays and documentaries, its extreme, claustrophobic force is undiluted. The 1970s was a hotbed of scandalous art cinema, but "Salò" -- unlike such X-rated shockers as "Last Tango in Paris" or "In the Realm of the Senses" -- has not been tamed by the passage of years. If anything, there is a cruel, chilling timelessness to both its imagery and its logic. The shock hasn't worn off in the slightest.
While Pasolini mingled the sacred and the profane in much of his earlier work, "Salò" exists in an utterly godless realm. It combines and explicitly links two unmentionable subjects, transposing the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom," a massive and minutely detailed catalog of sexual torture perpetrated by four wealthy libertines in 18th century France, to the Republic of Salò, the puppet government that Benito Mussolini established in the final days of World War II.
