Teorema (1968)
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Film Review

In arguably his most abstract and baffling work, the great Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini draws together the various themes that marked his life and his career - Marxism, religion, homosexuality and mysticism.  The film is also his most flagrant assault on the bourgeoisie, with the voiceover narration stating repeatedly that the bourgeois class is incapable of doing the right thing.  It is a compelling, surreal and disturbing work, filled with political allegory and humanist sentiment, as reactionary as anything produced by Pasolini's contemporaries of this period but infinitely more mysterious.

The infiltration of a familiar bourgeois set up by an unknown young man (Terence Stamp) is a thinly veiled caricature of Christ's arrival on Earth.  In each case, the enigmatic outsider transforms the lives of those around him, to the extent that when he has departed they are each sent on a radically different course.  Only the humble maid (Laura Betti) achieves fulfilment in her new life.  The others are frustrated or crushed by their bourgeois origins, unable to break free of the chains that bind them to their social position.  It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…

Pasolini seems to identify himself most closely with the young son in the film - both have a bourgeois upbringing, both are gay, both have chosen the career of an artist.  The film spends a surprisingly great deal of time showing us the artist at work, showing us how tormenting his life can be.  The artist stands on a narrow precipice - on the one side there is spiritual fulfilment, embodied by transfiguration of the maid, on the other there is oblivion, illustrated by the fate of the rest of his family.  The artist, with his urge to question and to create, has the possibility of success or failure - he constantly lives in hope of one, but always fears the other.  His life is one of perpetual limbo.

With a directness that is both shocking and brilliant, Passolini insists that sexual need is the most significant thing - perhaps the only thing - which drives human development.   All eyes are drawn not to the stranger's handsome face but to his seductively tightly wrapped groin area, as though this contained the magical key to an individual's liberation, to his or her personal destiny.  Each member of the cosy bourgeois family is ensnared by this obscene object of desire and are either redeemed by what they experience when it is handed to them, or else condemned by it.  In either case, the sexual power that is released creates a mirror which reveals their true nature, with extraordinary consequences.  Francois Ozon's controversial 1998 film Sitcom covers the same territory, albeit somewhat less subtly, as a black comic farce.

The film's most evocative and controversial sequence - a middle aged man running naked across Mount Etna - is hugely symbolic, portraying the innate arid sterility of bourgeois existence, an ash-laden void that leads to nowhere.  This is a visual metaphor for the life that now awaits the man's wife - a fruitless existence consisting of increasingly meaningless liaisons with pretty young men.  The artist son may find satisfaction in his work, but he remains equally in a void, unsure of his worth, unable to call upon others to reassure him.  Only those who are born poor and inconsequential have any hope of salvation.  Once again, Pasolini is attempting to fuse his notion of Marxist ideology with his simplistic interpretation of Christianity.  One of the peculiarities of this film is that it is not clear whether the director is being overtly sarcastic (indeed blasphemous) in his attitude towards religion or is genuinely sincere in what he is presenting.  Like all great works of art, Teorema allows us to read into it what we will, to draw our own conclusions and, perhaps, to divine something of our own true nature from what we see.

Film Synopsis

A comfortable middle class family is visited by an enigmatic dark-haired young man.  One by one, the members of their family - the husband, the wife, their daughter, their son, and their maid - succumb to the seductive charms of the stranger as he unleashes their innermost desires.  Once the mysterious visitor has departed, each one of them is traumatised and undergoes a strange transformation.  The maid returns to her rural village, where she performs miracles to an amazed entourage of peasants.  The wife wanders ghost-like around the town, picking up strange young men to feed her carnal appetite.  The daughter falls into a comatose trance and has to be hospitalised.  The son leaves his home to start a career as an abstract artist, yet he struggles to create anything of any worth.  The father surrenders his factory to his workers and, stripping himself naked in a railway station, runs across the ashen surface of a dormant volcano...