Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968)

The most exultant moments of Pasolini’s inexhaustible Theorem are its opening ones, plunging us into a news footage-type presentation of a rich man who’s given away his factory to the workers – an act of apparent progressive altruism that’s immediately analyzed as suspect, as stripping the workers of the possibility of a future revolution (the ultimate example, one may think, of a glass half empty). The film that follows confirms the skepticism though, leaving a heavy impression of the stickiness of the bourgeoisie: they may lose their bearings, their sanity, their morality, or even consciousness itself, but they persist at the centre of their stories, tarnishing the figurative and actual landscape they inhabit. It’s a sly joke, perhaps, that the medium of this unwinding should be the mysterious visitor played by Terence Stamp, and the popular summation of the film, highlighting his seduction of each member of that rich man’s family, makes the film sound much racier than it actually is (while it draws our attention repeatedly to the visitor’s crotch, it’s almost strenuously chaste in how it visualizes other sexual happenings, particularly by comparison with the unbound nudity of Pasolini’s later films). In comparison to the family’s solipsistic responses, the maid apparently perceives Stamp’s visitor as a medium of holy transformation, and retreats to her rural home where she demonstrates healing and levitational powers before willingly embracing death: the contrast may speak to the relative purity of the working class, but also to its passivity in the face of transformational possibilities. Although Stamp’s character may sound schematically conceived, he also has the film’s most playful, spontaneous-seeming moments, pointing to how the bourgeoisie’s failure is as much one of intimate self-understanding as societal stewardship. Ultimately, the rich man is reduced to wandering naked in a barren desert, stopping to emit a crazed, accusatory cry, perhaps speaking for his own plight, perhaps for that of us all.