Salo Or Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom Review

Pasolini transposes the Marquis de Sade’s infamous 18th-century novel (written in a prison cell) to the fascist puppet state of Salò, Italy, 1944. Four libertine masters—a Duke, a Bishop, a Magistrate, and a President—abduct eighteen young men and women. They take them to a isolated villa, where for 120 days, the teenagers are subjected to a systematic program of humiliation, ritualized depravity, and eventual torture and murder.

The final shot is of the two youngest guards—who participated in the horror—now idly dancing together. They look bored. This is Pasolini’s ultimate argument: evil doesn’t end with a scream. It ends with a shrug. salo or salo or the 120 days of sodom

The film is structured like a Dantean circle of Hell: the “Ante-Inferno” of selection, followed by the circles of Mania, Shit, and Blood. The final shot is of the two youngest

The final twenty minutes of Salò are among the most punishing in cinema. There is no last-minute rescue, no moral epiphany for the villains. The masters sit on a rooftop, spyglasses in hand, watching the remaining teenagers through binoculars as they are killed. Then they dance a minuet to a piano. It ends with a shrug

Salò is a masterpiece. It is also unwatchable. Those two things are not contradictions.

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom : The One Film You Should Never Want to “Like”