Salò

Not very festive to review Pasolini’s uber-controversial 1975 film as the holiday period commences, but maybe this is the apposite time to enter the debate. Although it’s out in the US this week, I’m firmly embargoed from writing about Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest until far-off Feb 2024. I was an admirer of Glazer’s Sexy Beast and Birth, less so his abruptly truncated adaptation of Michael Faber’s Scottish sci-fi novel Under the Skin. So don’t take it from me; you can read in plenty of sources elsewhere that The Zone of Interest depicts the well-documented domestic bliss of Commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig and their five children as they live in luxury in the shadow of the Auschwitz concentration camp, their own hard-scrabble existence punctuated by the shouts of screams, gunshots and unseen, belching ovens.

Depicting the effects of fascist dictatorships, or not, has been one of cinema’s most problematic ambitions; Shoah and Schindler’s List were correctly seen as key texts, but whatever lessons we might learn from them seem to have been swept away by the trend towards the monetised hate-speak of professional anti-Semite Elon Musk and others. Pasolini’s brother had joined and fought for anti-fascist forces and was killed back in 1945 by the Brigate Garibaldi. The Italian director made Salò on the back of his vivacious Trilogy of Life films, and was intended to be the first of Pasolini’s darker Trilogy of Death. A straight depiction of what happens when fascism takes over, Salò shows teenage boys and girls rounded up, tortured, raped and murdered over a four-month period of sexual violence for the entertainment of the patriarchy who have gained power over them.

If Glazer wisely decides to depict nothing about what happened in Auschwitz, Pasolini goes the other way and depicts the sadism and the cruelty in extreme detail; his reward for his conscience was to be brutally murdered weeks before Salò was released. The numbing, discomforting experience of watching Salò used to be a warning about the grim past remembered by our parents and grandparents; in 2023, it’s a unflinching promise about the way that we’re currently headed. Our leaders warn of immigrants ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ and there’s plenty of us happy to go along, to focus on our domestic situation like the Höss family and try to pretend we don’t hear the disturbing noises off. In Europe, the bomb craters and war memorials still remind us of how fresh the wounds are, but the point has been forgotten; today’s crowds don’t chant about freedom or independence, but ‘burning the empire’, defiance in the face of encroaching, deadly fascism.

Most inherently conservative viewers will ignore films like Salò or The Zone of Interest; they’re too upsetting to be considered part of our evening’s escapist entertainment, confirming our gradual realisation that monetising hate is nothing new; Höss lives in a world of personalised pay-rates and incentives to gas as many innocents his superiors deem to be poisoning the blood of his country. In a world contorted by manufactured hate, films like Salò are made impossible for us to see, lest we remember why they existed in the first place. But the world they warned us about, of cheating, of lies and of greed and murder, is still here and ready to make the banality of evil stick next time around.