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.
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.
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 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 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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