Teorema 1968

 

The first time I saw this film I had just turned 20, and was living with roommates in a walkup apartment in Chelsea on 19^th street. Since we lived across the street from the Elgin Theatre I would spend many hours there seeing some of the great classics of film, especially foreign and new wave movies. It was there that I saw my first Truffauts. I was not a stranger to sophisticated cinema. Since I was a teen I had been going to our rundown little art theatre in Brooklyn The Astor on Flatbush Avenue, next door to Erasmus High School. My high school friends and me would take the bus there from Borough Park usually on dreary Brooklyn Winter Sunday afternoons. There we would see films that we weren’t suppose to see or like Sundays And Cybelle, Dear John, Through a Glass Darkly, Tom Jones and This Sporting Life among many others. Also as a teen I would go with a few adventuresome friends to some of the more avant-garde theatres like The Gate to see underground films most of which are vague memories. My point of all this nostalgia is to let you know that I was a tearful moody sophisticated teenager and young man. I don’t really recall what I thought of this film, probably that it was weird and obtuse but I felt adult and hip seeing what was probably my first Pasolini film. I could brag to my roommates. So it was with regret that I must report that my latest viewing of this overwrought and pretentious film left me empty and cold. There is really no plot; Pasolini mixes in Marxist politics with sexual longings and disgust along with lots of religious imagery and dogma. He presents us with an attractive and sexy young man visiting a very bourgeois family living on the outskirts of Milan in a over designed “with it” house, ugly but eye catching in its crassness. Terrace Stamp who at the time was getting to be well known star plays the good-looking young man. He had an Oscar nomination already for Billy Budd and was in many big movies including “The Collector” and “Far From The Madding Crowd”. 

We don’t know who Stamp is or why he is there. He is simply known as “the visitor” in the credits. Stamp was at this time as I said very attractive and Pasolini spends a lot of camera time on his crouch and his ass, which is used to alert us to the sexual allure of him. He is on the make and we don’t know why.  The father played by the handsome and virile Massimo Girotti who in his early film career played the sweaty and sexy lead in Visconti’s first film an adaptation of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” that was known as”Obsession”. He owns a factory that makes something and he is trying to do right by his hard worked employees. The Mother is Silvana Mangiano one of the great beauties of Italian cinema and a fantastic remembrance of my childhood when my mother sat me down in our neighborhood run down theatre to watch a dubbed version of “Anna” Silvana is coiffed and dressed in severe late 60’s style not my speed, but she was still fabulous. There are two children the young girl is played by one of Bresson’s “models” Anne Wiazemsky and Andres Jose Cruz Soublette, the only unknown actor to me, plays the carrot top son. Added to this mix is the loyal and doting maid played by the great Laura Betti. One by one Stamp seduces them in a very tasteful manner, maybe too tasteful and their lives are forever changed. The daughter winds up in a catatonic vegetable state her fists tightly clenched, the son goes off and becomes an artist, the worst sin of all and does some dreadful paintings while talking to himself, the mother drives around picking up young good looking boys with big bulges and tight asses, but does not enjoy her escapades and she still looks as bored as she did before Stamp. The father talks about giving his factory to his workers and as he waits in the huge Milan train station takes off all his clothes and walks to the desert howling like a wolf. My favorite is Betti who goes back home to her family in the rural farmland of Milan and just sits for days on a bench, performing some miracles while her hair turns gray, refuses to eat except for nettles.  My favorite scene is of Laura floating in the air above the roof tops like a balloon from the Macy Thanksgiving day parade.  She is finally buried alive by her mother. Pasolini uses references throughout the film, a coffee table book of Francis Bacon’s paintings all tortured and homo, a book of Rimbaud’s poetry all tortured and homo, discarded clothes especially male underwear, empty and misty landscapes. It all pretty much adds up to nothing, a theory without a solution, a puzzle without all the pieces.