This is great, but I'm not sure if for the reasons usually cited.
Yes, there is a fable here, a mysterious man upsets balances in a bourgeois household. Yes, it is from those times -Bunueltimes, Godardtimes- when the word 'bourgeois' was meant quite vehemently. It is symbolically abstruse throughout about empty lives and the quest for meaning.
But, I think as with these people depicted on desperate journeys to fulfillment, the more you cling to the search for meaning as a viewer and try to boil it down to something that makes sense, the more you end up with just an allegory about the failure to do it. For all I know, that was Pasolini's intention, echoed loudly in the parting cry for god in the wilderness.
No matter. Me and him mean wholly different things by emptiness. What captivates me here is the free form of the narrative, the cinematic eye that places you as transparent observer in the same world as these people, not easy to accomplish this at all, and the journey through cracks of story to the wondrous emptiness of everything (trees, sunlight, concrete, people) languidly floating in space together.
It is in the same direction as Antonioni, though hampered by allegory. It invigorates the senses like he does. And the eye is tuned to the same architecture of empty space as seen in L'Eclisse and Blowup.
Pasolini may have meant this as lament or indictment. I get the same melancholy joy as from Japanese woodblocks.
