A mysterious, handsome stranger (Terence Stamp) arrives at the house of a Milanese factory owner and his well-to-do family and proceeds, over the next few days, to seduce each member of the household in turn. Just as suddenly and inexplicably – about halfway through Pasolini’s remarkable 1968 film – he departs, leaving the family members to deal with the explosive effect he has had on their lives. Their reactions differ wildly; the father strips naked at a railway station and decides to hand his factory over to the workers; the mother plunges into random sexual encounters; the son becomes an artist; the daughter goes into a catatonic state; the maid returns to her village, starts eating nettles and levitating, and becomes a kind of saint.
Elegantly composed and shot, brimming over with rich, if ambiguous, symbolism and expressing the director’s fascination with the various ways in which class, sexuality, politics and religion intersect, Theorem is one of Pasolini’s greatest and most accessible films. Indeed, it’s one of the great European films of the 1960s – and while very much a product of its time (from Stamp’s wardrobe to the Marxist obsession with deconstructing the bourgeoisie) it’s a film that, because of its exploration of humanity’s need for transcendent spiritual or religious experiences, comes across as less ideologically rigid and emotionally arid than much of Godard’s similarly themed work of the period.
Stamp has barely a word to say – and, according to the accompanying interview, Pasolini never once spoke to him during the making of the film – and yet exudes a magnetism that makes the strange proceedings quite credible. Indeed, the film as a whole is virtually silent (boasting a mere 900 words over 100 minutes); not that this ever seems in the least bit contrived or forced, the rhythms of the visuals seducing the viewer into accepting the film’s world as surely as Stamp’s mysterious stranger beds his various hosts. Whether you see his character as a Christ-like redeemer of those trapped in the wilderness – a Biblical image of an ashy Wasteland that punctuates and haunts the film throughout – a Devil who stokes the feverish desires bubbling under the bourgeois surface, a Situationist agitator and destroyer of the status quo or something altogether stranger (Pasolini once referred to the film’s enigmatic visitor as an ‘Ultra-terrestrial’) is down to how you read this undeniably rich and compellingly strange fusion of politics and mysticism.
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