Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1976)

Written by CinemaSerf on August 29, 2022

Well you have to hand it to Pier Paolo Pasolini - he had one hell of an imagination. Here he devises a story of a group of nine young men and women who are apprehended by four powerful Fascist officials and held captive for use in some of the most degrading and painful games of sex, humiliation and abuse. I was warned not to eat chocolate before I saw this, and towards the end of this bizarre depiction of cruelty, depravity and exploitation it became quite clear why - and I'd reiterate that here. There is something profoundly desperate about the film. It has nothing even vaguely redeeming about it. Is it allegorical? Perhaps Pasolini is swiping at what he perceived to be the beginning of the disposable culture? Perhaps the illustration of mankind at it's more obscene offers us his perspective on just what humanity had become by the mid 1970s? In any case, this is frankly rather a disgusting film to watch and though I did feel the ending had a great deal of suitable retribution to it, I still struggled to quite get my head around this epitome of man's inhumanity to their own kind. I doubt I shall ever watch it again, but it packed out the cinema in which I watched it and there was plenty of provocative conversation in the bar about it afterwards...