Theorem (Teorema)
A Film by Pier Paolo Pasolini
1968, Italy
The 60s films revisited series continues… .
Directed by Pasolini
Written by Pasolini
Music by Ennio Morricone
with
Terence Stamp as The Visitor
Silvana Mangona as Lucia, The mother
Massimo Girotti as Paolo, the father
Anne Wiazemsky as Odetta, the daughter
Laura Betti as Emilia, the servant
Andres José Cruz Soublette as Pietro, the son
Ninetto Davoli as the messenger
I remembered this surprisingly well after fifty years. I knew what was going to happen next as I re-watched. I know I saw it twice, and it was in my heavy film period when I did things like sitting through hours of Andy Warhol. In 1968, my girlfriend was half-Italian, and I worked through most of the then current Pasolini. I recall seeing it in with her family group in London, and I’m sure it was in Italian, without subtitles, and soon after release. I was told subtitles wouldn’t matter much as the story self-propelled and there were long sections without dialogue. True.
Then I saw it again, probably at a university film club, in Hull. That had subtitles. It’s way better without, and no, my Italian does not extend beyond the menu. The dialogue, as translated, is extraordinarily pompous, clunky and clumsy.
Subtitles. Probably better without them.
It was Pasolini’s first film with a fully professional cast. Not only that, but it starred Terence Stamp. Was he hot in 1968! It came on the heels of Far From The Madding Crowd, Modesty Blaise and Poor Cow. He must have wanted to do a serious film with a seriously foreign director. In fact, looking at IMDB, Theorem saw him transition from A-list (Far From The Madding Crowd) to a ten year run of more minor art house films … including Fellini. This was his deliberate choice. Silvana Mangano however was propelled into more international fare. Anne Wiazemsky was born in Berlin. She played the daughter in Theorem and she married Jean Luc Godard. Add Ennio Morricone’s music for a powerful line-up.
Terence Stamp was interviewed inThe Guardian:
He ended up doing Theorem, he says, because he bumped into childhood crush Silvana Mangano, who he’d seen in the neo-realist classic Bitter Rice, on a Rome street (“I couldn’t believe she was there in the flesh”) and she suggested him for the role. “Pasolini told me: ‘A stranger arrives, makes love to everybody, and leaves. This is your part.’ I said: ‘I can do that!’ … Pasolini, he says, startled him by filming with a secret camera: “I realised he was trying to get something from me when I wasn’t performing. He wanted a kind of being-ness.”
Interview by Andrew Pulver, The Guardian 12 March 2015
The blu-ray has an English dubbed version, but I hate those, preferring subtitles. I wonder whether that dubbed version was released theatrically? They did with Un homme et une femme some months after the subtitled version (I saw both). The Italian release was September 1968 for the Venice film festival. I’m sure that’s around when I saw it, because I used to stay with my girlfriend’s family in London on the way back to university. It had a UK theatrical release in April 1969. This was unusual for any non-English language film in those days. The presence of Terence Stamp was probably more important than its critical acclaim.
The film opens with a sequence of soft focus sepia, with subtitles employing the word bourgeois with distressing frequency. We’re setting up that The Father (I barely picked up any of their names, apart from Emilia) is a factory owner, wealthy and, er, bourgeois. In English bourgeois has a heavy political resonance. Pasolini would be good with that, but it doesn’t fall off the tongue easily even in a Socialist Worker party meeting.
Terence Stamp is the Visitor. Pasolini favours the crotch shot.
Terence Stamp is The Visitor, who might be God, or their nemesis or just an enigmatic bisexual visitor. His arrival is announced by the messenger, skipping across the lawn in faun-like style with his grin and curly hair. Ninetto Davoli appears in much the same boyish curly-headed smiling role in most Pasolini films (he was a boyfriend and partner). His appearance on film is a signature.
The Messenger (Ninetto Davioli) skips into every Pasolini film
So the next sequence is seduction. Well, the critics call it ‘seduction’ so I’ll stick with the word, but Terence Stamp is cold and asexual throughout. He’s not so much seducing as engaging in wish fulfilment. The Visitor stops the servant Emilia committing suicide and seduces her.
Emilia (Laura Betti) is a tad religious, but not bourgeois
He shares a bedroom with the son. And seduces him. It must be the white underpants that turns him on. Not that the Visitor is ever a predator. He realizes that the Son fancies him madly so gives him what he wants … which is the case with all of them.
The son (Andres José Cruz Soublette)
He seduces the mother (a woman who wears full make up with heavy mascara and lipstick to go to bed, even with her husband.) I felt sorry for Emilia laundering all those pillows. The husband is not fulfilling his marital role, so the Visitor steps in.,
The Mother (Silvana Mangona) on the sexual frustrations of being bourgeois
He seduces the daughter too.
The daughter (Anne Wiazemsky)
She continues “I loved only my father. But now in leaving me you’re making me worse than before.’
Finally, he seduces the Father, who is ill, suffering from being bourgeois perhaps.
The father is ill with a bad case of bourgeoisitis.
The Visitor applies therapy
So we get quite a bit of sex, but in modern terms, even pre-9 pm TV terms in 2020, none of it is that explicit. I would guess that Pasolini had a major fetish about male underpants and the male trousers lying on the floor with an opened fly. It looks like the sight of a pair of white Y-front pants does it for him. No heaving bodies. However, while it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival, it then got banned for ‘obscenity’. It was denounced by Pope John VI. Pasolini got an acquittal for “high artistic value.”
“It was a very obscure movie – it was going to be seen by four drag queens and Einstein. And when the Pope came out against it, everybody wanted to see it.”
Terence Stamp, The Arts Desk, 11 April 2013
Everyone confesses to the Visitor in one way or another. The servant to being unhappy and suicidal. The mother to being sexually frustrated. The son to being gay. The daughter to being afraid of men. The father to being bourgeois.
Then the Visitor goes away, leaving everyone bereft. They will all suffer.
The son runs off to become an artist, painting on glass, pissing on canvas, throwing paint randomly, all in an effort to make sense of it all. I know how he must have felt. Perhaps he realized he was descended from the bourgeois.
The son’s art work. Limited technical skill, but you can see what I mean about the dialogue.
The daughter falls into a catatonic state and is born off on a stretcher to a bourgeois hospital. The essay in the blu-ray edition says:
By contrast the daughter is a somewhat inspid figure in her ordinary, pre-stranger existence, while her succumbing to the stranger triggers a crisis seemingly connected with the awakening of repressed incestuous feelings for her father … all too classically Freudian to be taken seriously.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, booklet to BFI edition
The daughter in a catatonic state, with family
The mother drives around in her chic British Mini car, picking up young men on corners who look vaguely like Terence Stamp. They are standing around importuning for male trade by the look of it. She starts with one, then picks up a pair. She screws one in a ditch … don’t worry , we only see her feet. She is so immaculately dressed, being bourgeois, that I can’t see her doing it lying in a ditch. But she does.
Emilia back in her village. Children bringing nettles.
The most interesting is Emilia, dressed in black, who returns to her village. I was told that she was a Southerner among the Milanese … er, bourgeoisie. This would shout out loud to Italians because of accent. We get some nice shots of the village … though to be honest, given a camera and Italy, it’s extremely hard not to get nice scenic shots. She sits against a wall, attended by a little girl and a little boy. She declines food, so the children gather nettles for her to eat. Then she ascends into the sky and hovers over the barn, saintlike.
Emilia ascends
Finally she is buried alive at her request. Well, she might be raving mad, but at least she’s away from the bourgeoisie.
Hot ashes for dad.
Finally we get the Father. He gives away his factory to his workers, thus becoming no longer bourgeois. Then he takes off all his clothes in the railway station, walks out and finds himself on the ash covered slopes of Mount Etna, bollock-naked, wading through the ash, ending with a scream. It is that kind of film. That’s the bit I remember very clearly.
The soundtrack is by Ennio Morricone and Mozart, and Morricone proves his ability to do weird jazzy stuff well. A tip, Ennio, don’t try the rock band though (Beat No. 3). This was the same year as The Good, Bad & The Ugly, so like Terence Stamp, Morricone was a major catch. .I assume the religious sounding choruses are the Mozart sections. The Italian OST LP has Morricone on Side One, Mozart on Side Two. The French version reverses that.
It was around this time that I remember telling everyone that film was measured by what people queued round the block to see on a wet Saturday night. Pasolini didn’t do that. However, the images (well, some of them) were powerful enough to lodge in my memory.
The quality of the BFI blu-ray is excellent. Good transfer, the right shape, fills a modern widescreen TV, but Pasolini was not using state of the art equipment for 1968, I feel. It’s all somewhat soft. The BFI notes in the blu-ray booklet have all the serious criticism – mine is much lighter.
A handsome young man arrives unexpectedly to stay with a Milanese industrialist and his family, gratifying their desires but leaving them tragically unhappy. Moderately amusing fable with the presumed intent of decrying all universal panaceas, including Christianity.
Halliwell’s Film Guide
i
The current BFI edition
THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)
[…] in my ’60s films revisited’ series added, this time Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Theorem’ (or Teorema). It starred Terence Stamp, fresh from ‘Far From the Madding Crowd.’ I’m amazed […]
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