Pasolini's Cruel Masterpiece

Prior to "Salò," Pasolini had made successive visionary, art-house-friendly, sexually graphic adaptations of Boccaccio's "Decameron," Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," and the Arabic folk-tale compendium "The Arabian Nights," all envisioned as a trio called "Trilogy of Life." But by the middle of the "Me Decade," the director was increasingly appalled by what he saw as a covert war on personal freedoms waged by a manipulative consumerist aesthetic whose commoditizing of sexuality was having a toxic cultural effect on Europe. Adapting de Sade's book became the artistic means to explore the enduring human capacity to rationalize the totalitarianism of unchecked greed.