Pietro (Andrés José Cruz Soublette), a young bourgeois who seems to follow in his father’s footsteps, dedicates himself to his studies and has fun like all the young people of his class, playing sports and talking about art and literature. Finally, Odetta (Anne Wiazemsky), a dedicated daughter, and the maid Emilia, played by Laura Betti.
An unnamed visitor, played by a beautiful Terence Stamp, arrives at this traditional family to alter everyone’s behavior and reveal their flaws. Could he be a force of nature? Could he be God?
Pasolini criticizes bourgeois society in a general and profound way, using divinity itself as a revealing instrument. Like Pasolini, an openly homosexual, many great artists, both in literature and cinema, have taken it upon themselves to criticize the middle class, from its beginnings to its development. One of the great filmmakers responsible for doing this was Luis Buñuel, from his great film “The Exterminating Angel” (1962) to the comedy “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972).
At a slow pace, “Teorema” allows the viewer to appreciate and detect the different symbols that the director uses and highlights everything in two parts. In the first, we see a portrait of the bourgeois family. Then, the appearance of the divine “guest” who gets involved with each of the family members.
He gives them his love, responds to their darkest and deepest desires, making everyone love him and become attached to him. From father and son to wife and daughter, everyone is intimate with the mysterious guest. Everyone is happy, even the maid Emília, who is the first to be intimate with the visitor and levitates.
The second part begins precisely when the guest tells the family that he must leave. From there, each one says goodbye to the young man with a monologue, in which they individually acknowledge the existential emptiness they had before his arrival, exposing the hypocrisy of society, the world of lies, deception and imagination in which they live, where all “spirituality” or sense of the sacred disappears, to make way for the only god that matters in the capitalist system: money.
As the visitor leaves, the conversation between each person, revealing their sadness at the departure and their own emptiness, is simply sensational. One of the most moving is that of the wife, who, with a fabulous performance by Silvana Mangano, manages to convey all her pain and sadness in an absolute way, with her gestures and looks.
After leaving for good, each person begins to experience drastic changes. The divine work is done, bringing change and an opportunity to communicate with one’s own essence, far from the paradigms and conventions imposed by society. But when they are abandoned in the shortest space of time, after such a revelation, their world, instead of transforming in favor of their own essence, on the contrary, explodes and goes into crisis, causing each person to collapse.
Pasolini, an LGBTQIA+ icon, may seem a bit pretentious, but his intention was to represent bourgeois society, its hypocrisy with the same values and beliefs that they proclaim, contrasting it with the “innocence” of the proletariat that often dies in its faith. From here and as the film develops, many interpretations arise, which each viewer can reveal according to their own criteria.
*Eduardo de Assumpção is a journalist and responsible for the blog cinematografiaqueer.blogspot.com
Source: Maxima
I am an experienced author and journalist with a passion for lifestyle journalism. I currently work for Buna Times, one of the leading news websites in the world. I specialize in writing stories about health, wellness, fashion, beauty, interior design, and more. My articles have been featured on major publications such as The Guardian and The Huffington Post.