Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s scathing indictment of both the Fascist-minded intelligencia in the last year of World War II and the unthinking conformists of his own time makes for a graphic and altogether horrifying film in Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. Controversial hardly describes this kinetic attack on the senses, described by some as a masterpiece and by others as the worst kind of arty trash. I rather take a middle road. Pasolini has important things to say and uses a shocking manner of visually symbolic expression with which to say them. As is often the case with passionate filmmakers, however, his excesses to make his point are often the very things which take away from the film’s eventual effectiveness. As a study in pure evil told through the actions and reactions of a perverse quartet of sadists, the movie is not pornography, but it is, in effect, flawed art.

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