an
unexpected visitor
Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay and director) Teorema (Theorem) / 1968
It is somewhat interesting to compare
Pasolini’s tale of a family with George’s Steven’s 1953 family visited suddenly
by a stranger. If in Stevens’ tale the family is at the center of life, crucial
for the survival of his pioneers, the Italian director’s utterly bourgeois
family life has delimited and thwarted the desires and personalities of its members.
As in Shane, the “visitor” (Terence Stamp) seems to come out of nowhere.
But in Pasolini’s work he is proceeded by a kind of comic angel, an
arm-flapping postman (the same bird-flapping figure from Pasolini’s previous The Hawks and the Sparrows, with Ninetto
Davoli) bringing the family a note of the Visitor’s arrival. The family accepts
him readily, almost as if they were expecting him, and are delighted by the
handsome “boy’s” appearance. Pasolini’s camera almost makes love to him,
zooming into his crotch time and again. And almost before anyone can get their
bearings, the angelic visitor saves their suicidal maid (Laura Betti) and beds
her.
As other guests arrive at the villa, the family’s son (Andres Jose Cruz
Soublette) must bed down with the stranger in his childhood bedroom. Unable to
sleep with the beautiful being lying in the very next bed, the son, almost like
Joey in Shane, can hardly keep his
eyes of him, attempting to view his naked body as the Visitor appears to sleep.
When the Visitor suddenly opens his eyes, the son goes scrambling back into his
own bed, pleading “excuse me, excuse me!” The Visitor joins the young boy in
his bed, comforting him and, presumably, engaging in sex.
Observing the stranger’s pants and underwear laid out on couch, the
bourgeois mother of this brood (Silvano Mangano) undresses and lies down out on
the balcony to await the return of the visitor, momentarily at play with their
dog. She too gets what she seeks.
Their daughter (Anne Wiazemsky) is the
next to seek his charms and is finally awakened in the process to her own
sexuality.
When the father (Massimo Girotti) cannot
sleep because of his daily pains, he rises early and on his return the bedroom
cannot resist opening the door to his son’s bedroom only to witness the two
sleeping together in the same bed. Even the vision of their coupling sends him
into a psychological tizzy, returning to his wife and requesting, despite the
fact that she is still sleeping, sex, which she refuses at that early hour. Ill
in bed the next day, the Husband is also visited by the angelic beauty, who
carefully brings the older man’s legs to his shoulders, peering down upon his
with his lovely blue eyes. The father almost immediately feels better and is
cured. The next day the two go on a drive before turning off into an empty
field were they, too, have sex, the father suddenly abandoning all he has
previously believed about his own sexuality.
Soon after the Visitor has provided each
of these insular individuals the love they apparently needed; the angel-postman
returns to announce the Visitor’s departure. And over the few hours each of the
family members reveal to the stranger how he has utterly changed them.
The “theorem” of Pasolini’s title has
been, clearly, that love changes everything; but how it changes each of them
remains the subject of the second half of the director’s film.
As I have already suggested, unlike in Shane, the stranger’s presence does not bring the father even closer, but
frees them to leave family life, some for better and others for worse,
depending upon their own abilities or inabilities to face the past, present,
and future.
The Maid, the most backward looking of
the group, returns to her rustic peasant village where she sits on a bench,
eating only nettles, before accomplishing several miracles (curing a young
child’s facial disfigurations and hovering in the air over one of the village
buildings) before burying herself.
The Daughter—who now claims she has
nothing to look forward too since the very best thing has happened to her has
been the Visitor’s encounter with her in the past—becomes catatonic and his
carried off to an institution, clearly having no further reason to live.
The Son, now completely involved in the
present, becomes a painter, trying again and again to create abstract paintings
on glass that reflect his experience with the Visitor, hoping to reflect the
radical nature and power of his experience.
The mother, freed from her near-frigid and meaningless bourgeois life,
drives off to seek sex with handsome young men, apparently, having sex with two
pick-ups in the same day.
The Husband, completely transformed by
his sexual revelation, seems to be the only one who entirely embraces a future.
Giving away his large factory to his employees, he catches the eye of a young
good-looking man before stripping off his clothes in the middle of a train
station, and, metaphorically speaking, voyages into a lava desert, a new world
in which he cannot imagine what he might find and in which may not even
survive.
The dissolution of the family brings
these individuals similar pleasures to Shane’s removal of the threats to family
life in the Hollywood work.
Los
Angeles, June 8, 2016
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2016).
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