Salò (1975)

100%

A vivid depiction of the depravity attendant upon using others as means rather than ends as well of unthinkingly following orders. This movie does not shy away from the implications of its theme: Humanity volitionally cut off from a positive purpose. It skillfully skirts the border between accurately analyzing degeneracy and being degenerate itself; its sordid catalogue of sexual perversions making it a profoundly repellant experience. However, given the charnel house that was the twentieth century, it is not without exceptional cinematic brilliance in its execution in being a film great power to haunt the mind of anyone who sees it.

The extreme content demands to be seen as a serious indictment of the Western world. Its excesses depict a materialistic and wealth obsessed culture that both consumes rubbish while producing great piles of it. The politically powerful have no power over their own desire to evade genuine political issues in favor of the vapid (& issue evading) freedom to consume anything in ever greater quantities. The relationship between sexual promiscuity and consumerism is here made explicit as people metaphorically and literally consume each other's bodies – especially the waste products.

A deeply and profanely political work, it is a call to action for Communists like its director (Pier Paolo PASOLINI) to see what the West as it really is and to do something constructive about it. However, this is the movie's partial failing: It presents the world in all it unpleasantness but without offering a credible alternative. An obsession with attacking the allegedly sacred can often mar great works such as this, nevertheless, the satire on the modern Western bourgeoisie is a devastatingly accurate one.

If ever there were proof that the Marquis de Sade and his followers were fools, madmen and the morally bankrupt, then this is it. It understands the insatiable–because never satisfied nature of those who find no pleasure in human warmth; hence, the emotionally distant shooting style that matches the depraved emotionally distancing themselves from others. They busily conflate pain with pleasure to vainly abolish the difference: 'When I see others degraded I rejoice' – yet they want to be both 'executioner and victim'. They cling to existence because they can achieve worldly success by blackmailing others to betray one another in exchange for preferential (or, at the very least, less harsh) treatment. Here "Rational" means "Unempathetic" in this masterpiece on the essential depravity of social engineering.

The work stands as a heartfelt plea from a man who personally experienced some of the events portrayed in the dying days of Mussolini's Italy. A strangely poetic drama – part self loathing; partly an expression of rage at a world that does not meet ones high ideals – that even the most jaded viewer will find shocking.

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