At the end of WWII, four Fascists take to a lonely villa in Northern Italy to indulge in their deepest and darkest desires. 18 teenaged hostages are taken along with them as victims. Their martyrdom is told in three ever more brutal chapters, about sex, shit, and blood, respectively. The fascist tormentors know no bounds in their hatred and fantasy behind their manifold ways of torturing. The film interprets the scandalous novel by Marquis de as a strong statement against fascism, the shocking images of which will stay with the audience for long.
Pier Paolo Pasolini deserves his place in our programme as an enfant terrible of Italian cinema: Again and again he crossed the then rigid boundaries of morality and kept provoking his surroundings with shameless depictions of (homo-)sexuality, as well as with his manifest communist ideology. But society had no tolerance for an artist as liberal and radical as Pasolini: they tried to sabotage the production of Salò several times by stealing film reels, and brutally murdered the director after the film was successfully completed.
Carlos Hartmann
Übersetzung: Carlos Hartmann
