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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Teorema (1968)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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The title of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s best film, Teorema translates to "theorem" and illustrates Pasolini’s favorite assertion about the middle class bourgeoisie: everything they do, no matter how much the result of some temporary self awareness about their place in society, no matter how well-intentioned, is always wrong. The film's style corresponds more to Pasolini’s style of poetry than to his earlier films. (Pasolini was known in this country as a filmmaker, but in Italy he was equally famous as a poet.) While the often shaky, documentary style of his other films does find its way into some of Teorema’s scenes, the film nevertheless embodies a more experimental approach, landing somewhere between a Godard film and a Bunuel film. It is never less than fascinating. |
 Teorema (1968) Starring: Terence Stamp Directed by:Pier Paolo Pasolini VHS Tape - $16.99 Not Rated Subtitles in English |
The film opens with tinted black-and-white scenes – silent save Ennio Morricone’s eerie music – of a well-to-do family of a Milanese factory owner. We meet Paolo (Massimo Girotti), the father, industrialist and family head, his wife Lucia (Silvana Mangano with an incredibly campy hair do), his teenage son Peitro (Andres Jose Cruz Soublette), his devoted teenage daughter Odetta (Anne Wiazemsky), and the family’s religious maid Emilia (Laura Betti). A messenger named Angelino (Ninetto Davoli, who flaps his arms like wings to make an obvious allusion painfully obvious) delivers a telegram to the family’s dinner table that reads: "I’ll arrive tomorrow."
The sender of the telegram is a mysterious, unnamed stranger played by Terrence Stamp, who seems perfectly content to sit on the lush lawn of the family’s huge home reading Rimbaud. But the stranger is soon the focal point of the entire household. Emilia is so distracted with lust by him that she tries to kill herself by inhaling gas from the kitchen stove, finally letting the stranger make love to her as she weeps tears of thanks. Next up is son Peitro, who steals peeks of the stranger’s naked body as he sleeps before he too is seduced. Lucia is next as she strips and lies nude on the sundeck in anticipation of him. Daughter Odetta and Paolo himself, whom the stranger cures of an ailment, follow suit (Paolo on the banks of a river in the dirt), completing the stranger's seduction of the entire household.
Soon another telegraph arrives at the dinner table, and the stranger tells the family he must leave immediately. Their safe middle class world having been literally and figuratively fucked over, the family members now experience epiphanies of self-awareness, admitting to the stranger that he has awakened them to the shallowness of their lives, or as Lucia tells him, the "horrible accumulation of mistaken ideas". But without the stranger, the family soon falls into madness.
Emilia goes to a farm where she sits silently, refusing to eat. Children from a nearby village come to her for healing, and she cures a young boy of a terrible skin disease. She refuses the food brought to her but instructs the children to gather and boil nettles for her, which they make into a soup. Emilia’s hair turns gray, and now a saint adored by the villagers, she levitates over the barn roof. Pietro, having been shown a book of Francis Bacon’s phallic and violent paintings, becomes an abstract artist, devising arbitrary techniques he feels will keep him above the criticism he deserves. He spills paint a la Jackson Pollack onto the canvas, and pisses on his all blue canvas (take that, Yves Klein!). Daughter Odetta spends her time measuring the distance she sat from the stranger in the garden – literally, with a tape measure – before lapsing into permanent catatonia. Lucia cruises the city in her car, picking up young men for quickie sex that look as much like the stranger as she can find, even having a tumble in a ditch beside a church. Paolo gives his factory away to the workers before – again, literally – stripping himself of everything in a bus station where he had followed a young man for a restroom tete-a-tete. Finally, he walks naked into a volcanic purgatory that has appeared in fast cuts throughout the film.
As compelling as it is bizarre, Teorema works as an allegory for the abuse religion takes by the shallow middle class, attempting to show that even through the liberating rituals of sex, true self-awareness among the bourgeoisie is impossible. With its frequent homosexuality – something that remains a middle class taboo – Pasolini’s film is designed to disturb its audience. While it has certainly lost some of its subversive power over the last 30 years, it remains Pasolini’s most complete Marxist slap in the face to his hated bourgeoisie. The film looks great, with Guiseppe Ruzzolini’s color photography perhaps the best in the Pasolini canon, and the music by Morricone ranges from modern jazz to atonal, George Crumb-like string quartets. That Teorema has become something of a cult film in recent years (even director John Waters has sung its praises) is no surprise; the film almost begs you to laugh at it, but you find the laughter getting stuck in your throat. A singular, odd and brilliant film.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.