Teorema (1968)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Teorema (1968) – P. P. Pasolini

I haven’t seen too many Pasolini films (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, The Decameron) and this one is certainly a lot more puzzling than the others.  Terence Stamp plays a mysterious “Visitor” who arrives at the bourgeois home of a factory owner and his family and proceeds to seduce each of them (maid, son, mother, daughter, father). Stamp is eroticized by the camera and the scenes unfold with little or no dialogue.  In fact, the film itself is full of heightened but plain images and little clear narrative structure.  After Stamp departs, each of the seduced characters changes.  Vincent Canby (of the New York Times) suggests that they each experience a sort of “collapse” (seeking to recreate the sexual experience with others or withdrawing into themselves or into art).  The maid becomes a sort of holy saint herself, which has led other reviewers to suggest that Stamp plays a reincarnation of Jesus or another god-like manifestation.  The factory owner gives away his factory to the workers -- either a Christian or Marxist act (forshadowed in the film’s odd opening).  Since Pasolini himself was a gay Marxist Catholic, interweaving these three themes into a puzzle film seems likely to have been his theorem.  More might be imparted by another viewing.