Théorème

As always with Pasolini, we get clumsy acting, dialogue and camera work, though here the story is so important and vital that I've given it more stars than it aesthetically deserves. A stranger appears within a wealthy Italian family, is seduced/seduces each of them--old and young, women and men--and they are all changed by his (its) presence. Though Terence Stamp is perfect physically for the androgynous/bisexual angel, he is a bit adrift among Pasolini's amateurish melodramatic and kitschy handling of film-making. I recommend it ONLY for the brave and rare portrayal of Connection/Love as genderless

Watching Teorema for the first time in 2017 it gave me a chill by the influence this movie clearly had on "Apartment Zero" (1988) - A film I only discovered last year but it has become one of my favorites. I know "Apartment Zero" so well by now, that at times it felt (felt is the operative word)I was in their same universe. They are both socio-political psycho sexual tales. Terence Stamp and Hart Bochner even look related to each other. Colin Firth represents a Country in decadence with a past of elegant pride, Massimo Girotti represents, for me, exactly the same things for different reasons in different ways but they are both seduceable in the eyes of the stranger. To think that Teorema was made in 1968 and Apartment Zero in 1988, boggles the mind. Mine anyway.

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.

Pier Pasolini creates a surrealistic, dreamy mood in the story of a stranger who proves to be a life-changing catalyst for an entire family. The stranger doesn't say much, but he really doesn't have to. The beautiful male visitor is played by Terence Stamp, at the height of his striking good looks. He manages to seduce the entire family, and functions as a miraculous religious figure in the process. The sexuality is really of the gay male variety, but the women of the family manage to "beard" the total extent of Pasolini's intentions. The film also serves as a criticism of post-war industrialized Italy and its depersonalizing cultural destruction. Lots of haunting imagery. Also, it's one of Pasolini's more "watchable" films. Nothing too disturbing here in comparison to some of his other movies.

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.