Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
ソドムの市
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Fascists, adolescents, a villa; the outer limit of what the corpus admits, kept as a limit.
Northern Italy, 1944, in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist state that survives under German control. Four men of power, known only as the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President, seal a pact by marrying one another's daughters. With the help of soldiers and teenage collaborators they have eighteen adolescents, nine boys and nine girls, rounded up and taken to a villa near Marzabotto. A boy who tries to escape on the way is killed.
The film is divided, like Dante's Inferno, into circles. Four middle-aged women, prostitutes working for the men, keep them company at the villa: three take turns telling stories of their sexual pasts while the fourth plays the piano, and the men act the stories out on their captives. The teenagers are sexually abused throughout. In the Circle of Manias they are kept naked, humiliated, made to behave like dogs and raped. In the Circle of Shit one storyteller describes how she killed her own mother, and at a mock wedding feast the men make the captives eat excrement. They hold a contest whose promised prize is death, and then withhold even that.
In the Circle of Blood the four men, dressed as women, stage a wedding with their soldiers. Searched and questioned in their rooms, the captives begin to betray one another to save themselves. A young guard, reported for sleeping with a maid, declares himself a communist and is killed on the spot. The men mark those who are to die with a blue ribbon; two are spared, a girl who informed on others and a boy the Duke favours. In the villa's courtyard the chosen victims are tortured and killed, while each of the four men in turn watches through binoculars from a window above. The pianist, unable to bear any more, takes her own life. In a room inside, two young guards dance a waltz together. One asks the other the name of the girlfriend waiting for him at home. Margherita, he says.
Starring
Paolo Bonacellias The Duke
One of the four libertines, a sadistic and fanatical Fascist, and the Bishop's brother.
Giorgio Cataldias The Bishop
The Duke's brother, a churchman among the libertines, who questions the captives and writes down the names of those to be punished.
Uberto Paolo Quintavalleas The Magistrate
A strict, cruel judge among the libertines, who takes particular pleasure in humiliating the captives.
Aldo Vallettias The President
A libertine with a dark, punning humour, who enjoys cruelty even when it is turned on himself.
Hélène Surgèreas Signora Vaccari
A prostitute who tells the stories of the Circle of Manias, stirring the men on with tales of her own past.
Sonia Saviangeas The Pianist
The woman who plays the piano while the stories are told, and who cannot bear what she witnesses.
Why it matters
Salò stands at the far edge of what cinema has been willing to show. Pasolini moved the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom to the last Fascist state of 1944 and made the abuse of eighteen teenagers into a picture of absolute power: people turned into property and bodies into things to be consumed. He said the real meaning of the sex in the film was as a metaphor for the relationship between power and its subjects, and critics have read it as an attack on consumer society. Pasolini was murdered in November 1975, three weeks before its premiere in Paris. It was banned in Italy weeks after its release, and in several other countries, for its depiction of the rape, torture and murder of people mostly thought to be under eighteen. It offers no pleasure and no release. What it leaves is a question about the men at the window with binoculars, and about anyone who watches.