teorema (1968)
Pasolini’s confession, his act of reconciliation between almighty God and man, is Teorema. Here he strips naked in the desert of the bourgeoisie and shouts toward the heavens, not in repentance, but in rapture. On his altar he lays down scripture and politics, lust and longing, art and artist and prays that his sacrifice will be enough to purify the act itself. The bourgeois family, the owners of a factory, are brought to waking life out of their stupor of dead, secluded comfort by the appearance of a house guest who neither speaks nor signifies, but rather awakens and provokes their inner flame to grow into a raging fire. For some, their appetites erupt as that of starvation in a desert on the first sight of food, and for others, they enter into a time of intense fasting and denial of their bodies altogether. Stamp’s stranger is an undeniable transformative force for each and every one of them, here elevated beyond melodrama, beyond comedy, beyond camp or tragedy, into a level of prismatic simultaneity. We pity them, empathize with them, laugh at them, laugh at ourselves; Pasolini’s power here is to destroy our entire notion of regarding the narrative with any consequence and cause a rift as dissociative within his audience as Stamp’s character causes in the lives of the onscreen family. This apparition, the personified hand of the divine, reaches out and contorts their self-image to the breaking point, each instantly becoming drawn to him and shattering their previous world with uncontrollable desire.
When mere mortals hear the voice whispering from the empyrean, it shocks them beyond measure. Pasolini here presents that the working class are able to more easily deal with this, paying it homage and gathering for miracles, yet the capitalists who cannot recognize this for what it is need to be shaken with a much more rigorous and clear method. Stamp’s Adonis, Kuleshov’s effect made flesh, merely smiles and stares blankly and coolly at the human mess of tangled emotional webs and insecurities he sees in front of him. Their only answer to enlightenment is, of course, to make love to it, the ego offering the body to it as the greatest of submissions. Pasolini’s first devilish gag is repeated over and over and is somehow more effective each time, the same as the visitor’s departure and subsequent distraught reaction from each of our players is equally repetitive while becoming more satisfying and comedic with each passing instance of agony that the family displays. Anne Wiazemsky as the daughter departs our world and the movie altogether when her body freezes in place, trapping her in a waking coma. So overcome by her memory, her preoccupation with the past, she simply ceases to continue in time itself. The son, confounded by his encounter, suddenly can no longer relate to people and becomes an acerbic painter, railing against political ideals and attempting to perform on planes of creativity where no other human being can join him. Pasolini is the same here, creating on a level where none could possibly grasp or even portend to criticize because none are on this particular wavelength. What good is it to argue and discuss when the work simply comes from a place so removed from material functioning that it no longer resembles reality in any actionable form? The family’s servant becomes an instrument of the divine unto herself, performing miracles and levitating up toward the heavens. In the end, she returns to the Earth itself to salt the ground with her tears. The owner of the factory, who instigates the flash forward that opens the film by giving away the means of production to the workers, sheds his worldly possessions and joins with the desert that they’ve been led into. Silvana Mangano as the mother continues to pursue the feeling that was awakened within her to debatable results. The various incidents of fallout from the encounter with the apparition are somehow more harrowing than the encounter itself, the lost flock cut off from the divine hand now roam the Earth looking to recapture the glory of their encounter, never finding it.
Pasolini has captured the feeling of eros and inspiration entirely, a sudden connection with a force from beyond the Earthly plane that feels an elation and then the subsequent crash of the mortal being when the inspiration ceases. Teorema in and of itself is an act of such inspiration, crashing to the Earth with the force of a man shouting toward the barren landscape, reaching out for the fleeting memory of the transformation, wanting to stay always in the feeling of transformative ecstasy. That our director is able to achieve this much without the use of words and merely imagery that holds the power of its symbols on its sleeve is equally impressive. In the end our director leaves every element entirely open-ended, are the characters searching for their lost inspiration? Are they repenting for what they’ve done? Was the act of becoming seduced by Stamp’s visitor repentant in and of itself? Pasolini does well to never state or answer, laughing at the idea of an answer, we are shown the cinematic vision and left to ponder the experience. Morricone plays jazz amidst the uses of Mozart, Pasolini does the same. Stamp reads an excerpt of Rimbaud describing the cosmic effect of a star that only returns to Earth so often, we feel its effects and then it’s gone. The brief agony and ecstasy of Teorema leaves our orbit and its effect remains.
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