Teorema

This is the most gentle and poetic film that Pasolini directed. The characters, the location and the narrative are symbols. Words in poetry can express many emotions, truths and philosophies, and so do the characters in Teorema. The general meaning of this film is open to discussion. In my view The Visitor (Terence Stamp) represents love, and love in this regard can be inspiration, devotion to another person without personal benefit. When The Visitor shows the family another truth, and then abandons them, they are left in dispair, and are unable to return to their former way of living. I think the family represents people living in a capitalist system. Pasolini was a Marxist and he directed this film in 1968, a revolutionary year in which the youth of Western Europe (and a part of Eastern Europe) revolted against their governments and wanted to build a society based on new principles. This is a very relevant film for unpoetic times.

The prologue of this movie is actually the epilogue. Pasolini emphasizes the artistic freedom to turn the world inside out and fictionally destroy all conventions. In a pseudo-documentary vignette intellectuals debate with the new industrialists {formerly "the workers"} and future plutocrats as to whether they will become subsumed by the bourgeoisie as a result of being inevitably corrupted by the trappings of wealth and power.

In the jump between the main story and the prologue a motif, {repeated throughout the entire movie}, of the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness, hoping to find the Promised Land, is inserted

We are introduced to the nuclear family in its bourgeois construct as an Industrialist with huge factories and a magnificent Milanese villa, his trophy wife, a beautiful female, sybaritic, vacuous and fashionably attired and coiffured, as befits her class, their son Pietro and daughter Odetta. All of them are illustrated as typically bourgeois, self-satisfied and complacently entitled to lead their lives empty of meaning. All bourgeois households of their class have servants and the religious peasant Amelia runs their household.

Pasolini then has a metamorphic agent, the boyish Terence Stamp, enter into their idyll. A cypher for the creative force of the auteur Pasolini himself, "the boy" insinuates himself into the individual lives of each of the five personae in the household. First, for no explicable reason other than the sexiness of his appearance, {Pasolini's homosexuality focuses on Stamp's prettiness and young slender physique}. Stamp's personality is quite reserved and introverted, so although he is seen to be reading the iconic gay poet Rimbaud, and playing the fool in a boyish way, we are never quite convinced of any intellectual passion.

The five seductions are all carnal, starting with the peasant Amelia, who is overwhelmed by Stamp's "aura" and, initially trying to avoid her "fall" by attempting suicide, succumbs to her desire for sexual congress with "the boy". In quick succession "the boy" inducts the younger son into the homosexual life. Here the thought occurs that a typical initiation into homosexuality by the older man would most likely be Pasolini's personal narrative, especially, as the story develops we see the son overcome his anguish by sublimating into the arts, as Pasolini himself, did. Next "the boy" is seduced by the mother and then the daughter pulls him into the bedroom. Finally the heterosexual father {in a typical gay fantasy "all straight men are potentially gay" } is seduced by "the boy". Having performed his role of alchemical mischief we are introduced to Tolstoy's novella "The Death Of Ivan Ilyich" when as if enacting the final chapter, the father falls ill and "the boy' takes his legs and holds them above his head giving him relief - it should be noted that Nabakov lectured on this work stating that Tolstoy considered bourgeois hypocrisy to be a moral death or suicide of the soul.

Then, suddenly "the boy" - the revolutionary agent of transformation - announces his abrupt departure {this takes place almost exactly half way into the movie}. Like the aftermath of a bad L.S.D. trip, {Pasolini created this movie in 1967 at the height of the 60's revolution}, the confusion and dismay of the five individuals are the necessary results of picking up the pieces, and living a life with new values, and the meaninglessness of the past.

Of the five the most personal is the son Pietro, who leaves home to take the path of the artist {Rimbaud's calling} and become a painter {deeply inspired by a coffee table art book of Francis Bacon}. He muses that now that his past delusions of normality were shattered by his realization of his homosexuality, he must embrace his difference and become a creative power himself. He becomes a painter and paints on glass reminiscent of Duchamp's "Bride Stripped Bare" - he goes through many changes and humiliations, eventually restoring his equilibrium and health, by realizing the inconsequence of his life in relation to the universe. Here you have Pasolini's personal odyssey integrated into the story.

As to the other players, Amelia the servant returns to her country roots, where she becomes an austere penitent, and performs the Catholic miracle of levitation, only to be buried by an old peasant woman {played by Pasolini's mother} and once again with reference to Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich" she declares that she is not dying but acting out of sympathy for those that are still living in moral death, aka the bourgeoisie. The mother in true homosexual style becomes a woman driven to find young boys { as in gay "cottaging", rent-boys, etc,}, and has anonymous sex with them. We leave her in a state of ungratified anguish. Odetta, the daughter {described by her mother as "caught up in the Cult of Family"}, allows her life force to seep away, while the father gives away his factories, and strips himself naked, ending up like his wife, wandering in the wilderness with no hope of finding the Promised Land.

Another peculiarity of this beautifully framed cinema is Pasolini's gay framing of the male crotch which is in contrast to the usual Hollywood focus on the female mammary, buttocks and legs. There is also some clothing fetishism with the camera lovingly gazing at the male Y-fronts. {underpants}

At the end of the explication of a theorem "Q.E.D." is affixed "that which has been demonstrated". I recommend this movie to those that are interested in the art of the 60's, gay art, revolutionary politics, and Surrealism in cinema. Its a mind blowing experience!

"There are only 923 words spoken in "Teorema" - but it says everything!", brags the tagline. It makes some sense, since Pasolini's film feels like a rhythmic visual poem with scattered dialogue. "Teorema" looks and feels like a haunting silent film integrated with sparse dialogue - failed attempts of communication and change among the characters.

A beautiful and enigmatic visitor (a young Terence Stamp, one of the intriguing, almost androgynous cult sex figures of the 60's, along the lines of a Udo Kier and others) seduces and then leaves each member of a bourgeois family. The father (Massimo Girotti, of Visconti's "Ossessione"), the mother (Silvana Mangano, "Death in Venice"), the daughter (Anne Wiazemsky, of Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthazar" and Godard's then wife), the son (Andrés José Cruz Soublette) and even the housemaid (Laura Betti, best actress at the Venice Film Festival for this performance) are all altered by the visitor's sexual presence in their lives, and each will try to find salvation or catharsis once they're abandoned. Their ways can be seen as an allegory of the fears and misconceptions of those trapped in their own conventions, and the tragic consequences of their failed attempts to get away - after the visitor, an hedonistic angel of death, tricked them with false hopes of sexual and emotional liberation. At least, that's how I see it - which I wouldn't dare to claim as an ultimate view on it. As enigmatic and haunting the images in "Teorema" are, they ask for repeated viewings. And just the fact that they give you enough interest for a second look, it's quite a feat. An interesting, cerebral cinematic exercise, to say the least. 8.5/10.

Probably Pasolini's most esoteric film up to this point, Teorema tells the story of a bourgeois family who invite a guest into their house, the awakening he causes, and their complete devolution after his departure. It's another critique of the upper classes from the Marxist who had been using his films to poke at the bourgeois since his first, Accattone. That it remains interesting as the portraits of dissolution play out is a testament to Pasolini's adept handling of the cinematic form. That it never really rises to greatness is a limitation of his need to "say something" with his films to the point of pushing out actual storytelling mechanics.

The family without a surname is led by Paolo (Massimo Girotti), the owner of a factory whose decision to give his industrial center to his workers is the subject of the opening of the film, a documentary-like interview with labor leaders from the factory who refuse to give any credit to their bourgeois boss, even as he does things that they want like devolve ownership to the workers, the interviewer asking if the bourgeois can never do anything good while the labor leader insists that it's only a ploy to make everyone bourgeois and avoid class conflict and warfare (communists are so...tiresome).

Where this actually happens in the story is unclear, actually, but the meat of the film is about the Visitor (Terrence Stamp), a young student known by Paolo's son Pietro (Andres Jose Cruz Soublette) who invites the Visitor to spend time at the large house the family calls home. The Visitor barely speaks, merely having a fascinating presence (the casting of Stamp is one of the best decisions in the film) and the showing of erotic but surrealist art to Pietro, awakening something within him. This awakening extends to Pietro's sister Odetta (Anna Wiazemsky), the mother Lucia (Silvana Mangano), as well as the maid Emilia (Laura Betti). The awakenings are mostly sexual in nature, though the Visitor's awakening of Paolo, while physical, is more therapeutic than sensual.

What is the Visitor? Honestly, this is one of those questions I never care about. I leave it as he's some kind of disruptive force who sweeps through the house and then leaves like a season or a storm. Is he angelic? Is he demonic? That's a level of symbolic reading that never interests me. The point is the effect, though, and the effect is what's interesting. This bourgeois family, living lives so empty of meaning, are completely thrown into chaos with the introduction of one outside element that shows them more than the pristinely curated view of the world they've known. It's a common critique of the bourgeois from leftist sources. It never strikes me as terribly realistic or insightful, but I think this film is helped by the fact that it's less strictly realistic and more purely metaphorical in intent. That creates emotional distance that something like Accattone was able to engage in, but the movement is still interesting.

The Visitor simply leaves the family, and the family reacts badly in different ways. Pietro leaves the family to become an artist (including pissing on a blue canvas because that's what he needs to do to recreate the presence of the Visitor, obviously something Pasolini did not find beautiful in its own right, making it fairly clear that he does not see this opening of the eyes purely good, probably because this bourgeois family is so unconnected to the world that they don't know how to process it). Odetta becomes completely catatonic. Lucia prowls the streets for random sex from young strangers who mostly remind her of The Visitor. Lucia becomes an ascetic who returns to her rural community, remains seated in one place drinking nothing but nettle soup, and then becomes some kind of holy figure climbing to the top of a building and floating in the air to the amazement of those around her. Paolo has a complete breakdown (it's very possible his giving away of the factory actually happens here), and he strips naked in Termini station before finding himself on the slopes of Mount Etna.

What does all of this mean? It means that Pasolini was a Marxist who hated the bourgeois and found them ridiculous, disconnected, and hopeless. Honestly, it's not the most interesting message because it's so rote. However, the delivery is what carries it. Pasolini had become known for his worldly, wordy films that used common Italian dialects instead of the Florentine while filming naturalistically (on the surface in the style of Italian neo-realism, but he wouldn't agree that he fell into that categorization), and here, in Teorema, he presents this theory of his on the bourgeois surrealistically and quietly. It's a distanced portrait of a family of four breaking down, and the actual steps of everyone's movements are interesting to me, even if the subtext ends up feeling shallow.

It's not one of Pasolini's great films, but I find Teorema to be something I can't quite ever take my eyes off of. I've actually seen it twice now, and I do appreciate it for its oddball portrait of a family in disarray towards destruction.

This is Pasolini's primary anti-bourgeoisie film and is sort of a complementary companion of Luis Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie." While Bunuel's film attacks the European post-war middle class (slightly different from America's middle class, though just as apathetic and selfish) with mockery, humiliation, and eventually destruction, Pasolini takes a more soulful route, revealing the hidden desires of a class stifled by social dogma and propriety. Rather than turn them into effigy, he allows them to have epiphanies, realizing their inner hollowness, and taking different paths to self-fulfillment. "Teorema" means "theorem," and in this case, the mysterious, beautiful stranger embodied by Terrence Stamp offers proof of a certain Italian bourgeois family's misgivings. Pasolini here offers a lucid statement, less political than Bunuel, but just as poetic. His execution, however, is dry and hokey, as Stamp encounters each family member almost mathematically. While the actors provide genuine emotion (particuarly in facial expressions, which Pasolini, in his entire body of work, has shown overwhelming appreciation for), the structure of the film is so tight that he almost sucks the life right out of his message. It's a curious film, though, not completely lacking in entertainment value. In a way, it plays out like a sonnet or other tightly structured poem type. Recommended is "Porcile," made by Pasolini, with similar themes, but presented more organically.