Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

This one shows up on lots of people’s lists of controversial and disturbing films.   I suppose for some viewers it might be challenging.  I found it a boring waste of time.  My hint should have come from the fact that it was inspired by a book by the Marquise de Sade: not being a priest-ridden eighteenth-century nobleman, I guess I am not so easily shocked by the things he found edgy.   In this post Pornhub world, bland simulations of anal sex and golden showers are not particularly challenging. 

You'll say I'm missing the point, that its not about sex.  OK.  There’s abduction.  There’s rape.  There’s degradation.  There’s torture.  There’s murder.  All of which you can find in a zillion other movies, presented more convincingly and disturbingly than they are here.     Sure, there were some uneasy moments, especially in the final reel, but I found the pace too slow, the presentation far too calm.  The teen victims just sit and stare quietly most of the time.  That may be what people really do in such a horribe situation, but it didn't work for me cinematically.   The victims contain their suffering so well that little of it gets expressed outwardly.   Or gets transmitted to the viewer.

Part of the problem is with the script.  The film is not, oddly, particularly visual.  Much of the “shocking” material is simply talked about.  The stories narrated by on-screen characters to their audience are generally repulsive but not terribly shocking or impactful.  Film is, after all, a visual media and delivering the theatricals as just verbal stories told by a grinning lady tends to gut what power they may have had.

Even that hypothetical power is questionable here.  My use of the word “gut” is not accidental, since much of the “disturbing” content in the movie relates to shit.  Literally.  And you know what?   Shit is just shit.   Sure it’s gross but it’s not particularly frightening or disturbing.  What we end up with is an absurd caricature of bad S&M porn or tacky “body horror” (if talking about wallowing in shit and then shit-eating qualify as that) that is both dull and too ridiculous to be believable.  And that’s a big the problem: if I don’t think something is real, if I don’t believe in it, it does not disturb me greatly. 

So to boil it down… it’s a movie about shit and piss and violence and power and sex.  It’s been done.  The most amazing thing about his movie, perhaps, is that such a potentially incendiary mix of preoccupations results in such a boring movie.  In any case, it doesn’t grab me and it doesn’t seem groundbreaking.  Not only has it been done before (and since), it’s been done in far more confrontational and impactful ways (go watch Straw Dogs, for fuck’s sake).    

The fact that was apparently intended as “art” instead of “exploitation” signifies nothing.  Those are useless marketing categories.  Similarly, the fact that it’s a political statement also doesn’t cut much ice…if only because it isn’t a very effective one.   I don’t know that it took a lot of brass to come out against fascism in 1975.  Less than in ’35, certainly.  Maybe less than it does today, too.  In any case, I’m not sure what anything in this film really has to has to do with fascism as a construct (as opposed to, say, totalitarianism more generally). 

If you are looking for a movie to leave you feeling uneasy and disturbed, you can find much better.   

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