 | Salo and Paolo Pasolini |
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Salзф (the film''s common abbreviation) occurs in the Republic of Salзф, the Fascist rump state established in the Nazi-occupied portion of Italy in 1944. The story is in four segments loosely parallel to Dante''s Inferno: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Feces, and the Circle of Blood.
Four men of power, the Duke (Duc de Blangis), the Bishop, the Magistrate (Curval), and the President agree to marry each other''s daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. With the aid of several collaborator young men, they kidnap eighteen young men and women (nine of each sex), and take them to a palace near Marzabotto. Accompanying them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, whose function in the debauchery will be to recount erotically arousing stories for the men of power, and who, in turn, will sadistically exploit their victims.
The story depicts the many days at the palace, during which the four men of power devise increasingly abhorrent tortures and humiliations for their own pleasure. A most infamous scene shows a young woman forced to eat the feces of the Duke; later, the other victims are presented a giant meal of human feces. At story''s end, the victims who chose to not collaborate with their fascist tormentors are gruesomely murdered: scalping, branding, tongue and eyes cut out; (see Franco Merli). The viewer is distanced from the vilest tortures, because they are viewed through binoculars. The film''s final shot, perhaps the most haunting of all, portrays the complacency, myopia, and desensitization of the masses: two young soldiers, who had witnessed and collaborated in all of the prior atrocities, dance a simple waltz together.
To date, Salи░ remains controversial, with many praising the film''s fearlessness and willingness to contemplate the unthinkable, while others roundly condemn it for being little more than a pretentious exploitation movie. But what is striking is the absence of the conversation on whether or not the scenes depicted are something which actually happened in Salи░, though many historians state that the gruesome scenes that includes torture and rape did likely never happen in Italy during WWII. What is historically correct in the movie is the uniforms and clothing of that time, the arms and the millieus. Salи░ has been banned in several countries, because of its graphic portrayals of rape, torture and murder бк mainly of people thought to be younger than eighteen years of age. The setting and the emphasis upon perverse consumption connects the brutality of Fascism to what Pasolini saw as the brutalizing effects of the modification of sexuality under late capitalism.