Eve Tushnet
at America magazine:
There are 13 directors whose films are recommended by the Vatican for their depiction of religion, but not all led lives notable for their sanctity. And one went on to direct the most notorious art film of all time. It is unlikely that the Vatican will ever praise “Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom,” the last movie Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed before his murder. Yet that film’s anthropology—its account of what it means to be human—is even more uncompromisingly Christian than Pasolini’s 1964 “The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.” “Salò” depicts a world of Christian anthropology without Christian eschatology—a world where human beings are made in the image of God, and there’s no hope.
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