Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom Reviews

Uncompromisingly violent, apocalyptic, and repulsive, SALO is the last film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was beaten to death by a male prostitute shortly before its release. Very loosely based on Sade's notorious fantasy of consensual sexual cruelty, Les 120 Journees de Sodome, this brutally explicit film is set in 1944 during the waning days of Italian fascism. A cabal of four authority figures--a magistrate, a banker, a duke, and a monsignor--lures a group of young men and women to an isolated villa, where they are subjected to unrelenting, ritualistic torture. The director, a Marxist with anarchistic leanings, presumably means to allegorize the institutionalization of violence under late capitalism--"It is the first time I am making a film about the modern world," he said--while transgressing every conceivable convention of bourgeois taste. The result, despite moments of undeniably brilliant insight, is nearly unwatchable, extremely disturbing, and often literally nauseous.