After watching Teorema, I get the feeling that one of the rivals of the image-focused cinema of Ingmar Bergman in the twentieth century was the renegade and iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini, who with the image of a face, a body, a sudden movement, or a stony silence was often able to draw out the stunning intensity of a character. Above all in Teorema, beyond the piquant provocations of a slew of ideas and the crosscurrents of a series of seemingly incompatible ideologies, this intensity of the image makes the greatest impression. So he profaned the sacred doctrines of the Catholic Church and combined some stuff he probably shouldn’t have if he had wanted to project the image of a good parishioner—none of that seems to matter if you gaze deeply enough at his images. He does some kind of honor to the internal life of the human being, whatever those cassock-wearing devotees have to say about it.
Teorema opens with a strong flash-forward in the style of documentary: a group of workers discuss outside their workplace why their boss, a man whom we later discover to be the father of the central bourgeois family, has resigned from his position and ceded to them the rights and ownership of his factory. Following this is the principal narrative, a rascally piece of class and religious criticism for which Pasolini was flagged by the Vatican and its allies (those cowardly good-for-nothings). A pert and smoldering young man played by Terence Stamp arrives at the estate of a bourgeois Italian family and starts seducing each of them, one by one, until all of them have been seduced and initiated into some of their own internal mysteries as though by a divine presence. The messenger boy, his exit and entrance marked by arm-flapping and a wily frivolity, adds a touch of satirical glee.
When this mysterious visitor leaves all of a sudden, the family remains in a state of moonstruck disturbance and an instability that in each of them has a different manifestation. The most interesting of these is that of the maid, played by Laura Betti, who returns to her childhood home and after sitting on a bench—she has a pinched, mousy intensity that makes her face almost fearsome—she promptly becomes a saint. Then comes that eerie image of her burial and the pockets of dirt filled with her saintly and divine tears. So much devotion can be somewhat unsettling.
And the last scene together with their lingering final images are something else: they seem to be the culmination of this slow unraveling of the bourgeois family’s sanity, doomed from those first sexual and salacious glimpses of the visitor—and so collapses the last outpost of all their sleepy bourgeois dignity. And while it suggests the film’s idea-driven premise and its scathing but indefinite critique, the title is less interesting than provocative—as if we had to sniff out the acrid smoke wafting from these shots fired.
But even with the title and the movie’s provocations, the aesthetic ideals of the director don’t fall by the wayside. In fact, the redemptive glimpses of the faces and their sincere, sometimes moving reactions to a narrative that is by and large set against them lends to Teorema a kind of compelling dialectic. Look at these bourgeois and how they squirm—and look at how they change, bowl over, molt, and dredge up a drastic humanity. It is brutal, absurd, and maybe in some way ennobling. That a director can bring this to life while taking on the extremity of a desperate naked man wandering in the desert is nothing if not impressive. Pasolini is a must.
