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3.0 out of 5 stars
A rather muted appreciation of a 'scandalous' classic., May 16, 2001
This review is from: Salò or The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (BFI Modern Classics) (Paperback)
'Salo' is a prominent in that select group of 'scandalous' 1970s films (e.g. 'Straw Dogs', 'In the Realm of the Senses') which retains the power to shock, appal, unnerve today (although I personally found 'Salo' more numbing that anything). Pasolini's last film before his brutal murder in 1975, it is a transplanting of the Marquis de Sade's infamous 1785 novel to the dying days of Fascist Italy, in which four prominent figures (a bishop, an aristocrat, a banker and a judge) retire to an abandoned villa with soldiers, courtesans, collaborators and 18 slaves to indulge in a ritualised orgy of sexual excess, faecal banquets, storytelling, torture and murder.
Gary Indiana's monograph starts well, with a number of apparent digressions effectively contextualising 'Salo': the author's first encounter with the film in the ... L.A. of the 1970s; 'Salo''s place at the culmination of Pasolini's career (with a clear-eyed appraisal of that career, and the personal and political biography that was inseperable from it); 'Salo''s status as the last major art-movie, released in the same year as 'Jaws' destroyed auteurism, independence and experiment forever (a development Indiana bracingly rants against).
Indiana is very good on Pasolini's contradictions, his courage and frequent dislikability, his style of 'contamination' (e.g. interspersing 'real' actors in a predominantly unprofessional cast; his recourse to pastiche and allusion) and some of his major themes - the lingering fascism in the soulless corruption of consumerist society and its debasing of the human body; the superiority of pre-industrial rusticity etc.
But when he gets to the film itself, Indiana opts for a lengthy description of its plot with occasional asides. As so often in this series (and the BFI classics), the lack of systematic criticism (from non-film-academic/critics)leads to a frustratingly bitty stu.
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