“The bourgeoisie must contemplate its errors and suffer by them.Pier Paolo Pasolini
A minimalist narrative plot
The fable is an underlying critique of Italy industrial post-war era carefully mixing the profane with the sacred.
An unexpected visitor with a magnetic presence insinuates in a bourgeois family. Under his leadership, this latest “meets its Damascus path” by revealing to its members a hitherto repressed sexuality. A Once the mysterious emissary has evaporated in nature, these the latter sink into their wanderings for some, lose their bearings or sublimate their instincts for others.
Through this hybrid and disjointed film, the filmmaker of LGospel According to Saint Matthew deconstruct a model alienated bourgeois to which he denies belonging. He who is rooted in pre-industrial cultural values of his native Frioul integrating Christianity, he could define as a Christian Marxist without the belief in God. Mystical allegory is the red thread of his filmography. In 1964, he already chose to shoot his Gospel according to Saint Matthew in Matera and in the Puglia, a most rustic setting to express everything the destitution of the Christic gesture. You have to be an atheist to make a good religious film.
The accidental visitor, catalyst of a sexuality repressed..
A theorem is a statement or postulate problem. Pasolini’s hypothesis is based on his aversion of the Italian bourgeoisie. He introduces a disturbing element in this family causing a traumatic shock, a stun in return; for him the only possible interior way of redemption.
The manifest androgyny of the visitor accredits his bisexuality while immersed in reading Rimbaud. Alternately angel and demon, the young man seduced one after another the members of this family by crisis. Giuseppe Rizzolini’s camera remains chaste and elliptical even if it frames in places and in a way insisting on Terence Stamp’s crotch and his underwear to meet a sexual fetish of the director while the embraces lovers only mimic the sexual act on the background of the requiem by Mozart. The redemptive mission of the envoy of God is accompanied by an initiatory will. Pier Paolo Pasolini has a deep attachment to its peasant roots, its Christian culture and the Marxist ferment of man of the people constitutive of his Anti-conformist intellectual DNA.
allegory of the sacred
The metaphor of the sacred and therefore the hierophanies, hear these spontaneous manifestations of the sacred, make up the intertext underlying Pasolini’s films. Theorem is not lacking. For Pasolini, the great mystics have a naturally sexual language and the sex should not be a taboo subject or subject of self-censorship. In Theoremit is even a developer.
The accidental visitor (Terence Stamp) personifies this alchemical troublemaker with the face of a cherub, half-angel and half-demon, hedonistic seducer, kind of antichrist still rough-hewn supposed to pave the way for the truth interior to its initiates. It insinuates and intrudes into the bourgeois normality of a wealthy Milanese family of which he shatters the narrow conformism and the class prejudices. The irrational comes to upset the bourgeois rationality incapable of producing feelings authentic.
Christian by the peasant culture granted by his family but non-believer, the Marxist filmmaker shares irreducible convictions that he exposes in the pseudo-documentary prologue also taking place epilogue where he radically challenges the model bourgeois. In front of industrial buildings in the city of Milan, an entrepreneur abandons his factory to hands of his self-managing staff being interviewed by reporters. One of the workers argues that the account is not there, it would still be necessary to get rid of the bourgeois morality.
Offenses against sexual morality
Although sexual morality has evolved considerably since the filming of this film, his daring treatment does not
never tire of being disturbing. The underlying message of Pasolini in 1968 is desperately dramatic in
his pessimistic realism. The Italian bourgeoisie has lost the sense of the sacred and the wealthy family is stuck in an existential vacuum.
After the “healthy” passage of the visitor who disappears at the middle of the film like a psychic vampire, the cell family, the smallest entity in society, implodes, leaves into a spin and its limbs fall prey to the madness of despair, loss of meaning or regression. With the exception of pious Emilia (Laura Betti), the maid of the family of small extraction, with regard to exorbity and at the port of Pieta. Struck by divine grace, she turns into an austere penitent before returning in his village of origin to find himself in levitation to perform miracles within his community and stoically accept his destiny of holiness.
Paolo (Massimo Girotti), the pater familias, industrialist fulfilled except in love, swears only by money and property. Here he is stripping himself of his firm to leave it to its workers. Imitating Saint Francis of Assisi, he does the same with his clothes and it is in the simplest device that he wanders in the immensity of a desert of black ashes. It is this same desert expanse that the Hebrews trample underfoot in their spiritual quest for the “promised land”. Of the ashes reborn a new life. The desert symbolizes the ascetic life. The father, however, is unable to live this mystical experience like St Francis because that its social substrate is different. And Pasolini, who has punctuated throughout his film with these shots of the black ashes of the desert, closes it on the primal cry of Paolo as if it took him to exorcise his neurosis.
Of sybarite, Lucia (Silvana Mangano), the mother experiences free love, becomes a nymphomaniac and engaged in wild prostitution by recruiting young people students in the streets. Odetta (Anne Wiazemsky), her daughter, falls into catalepsy after her denialism by the envoy of God whom she perceives as the archangel Gabriel. She will be taken to an institution.
Pietro (José Cruz Soublette), the younger alter ego of Pasolini, inspired by a book of collages by the painter Francis Bacon, discovers his latent homosexuality; pointing out his difference that he sublimates in painting abstract on trendy Duchamp glass. On a canvas blue makes him want to urinate thus adding a yellow organic.
“The bourgeoisie must contemplate its errors and suffer by them”
The curse pursued Pasolini throughout his life in because of his sexual attraction to ephebes. In extremely remote times, sexual relations between a mature man and a teenager were considered as natural and not posing moral ethics issues before Christianity does not become the dominant religion and imposes its cannons. Its underlying morality supports while the procreation was to be the ultimate goal of intercourse carnal. The Catholic Church believed that the family nucleus was the best way to spread his faith religious from parents to children. However, the sexual promiscuity and therefore a relative dissolution of manners was a creeping phenomenon within the majority of the Italian population.
If love seizes a bourgeois family, can it result? Theorem is the work of creation most licentious and most personal of Pasolini. The critic at the time spoke of a hoax against him. The experimental work definitely shocks morality public. After its stormy screening at the Mostra of Venice, the film nevertheless obtains the grand prize of the cinema of the catholic office and the Vatican, which dedicated it to the gemonies in the first instance, will rehabilitate him by after. No one is a prophet in his own country.
Theorem is theatrically distributed by the distributor Tamasa in 4K restored version from 23 november.