Teorema – Review by John Simon

Metaphoric Sex, Symbolic Circus

by John Simon

If Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema is not the worst film ever made, you can’t blame it for not trying. A mysterious, handsome Stranger appears, no one knows whence, at a party given by a wealthy Milanese industrialist. Pretty soon the whole household is in a dither. The elderly maid is about to commit suicide from sheer frustrated desire, but the Stranger obligingly hops into bed with her. In no time—in bed, on a sun deck, in the bushes—he has done as much for the industrialist, his wife, their son and daughter.

Then a telegram summons him away. The maid goes back to her parental farm, where she cures a boy of eczema, has her hair turn miraculously to silver, eats only a soup made of boiled nettles, levitates above the barn roof, and ends up by having a friend bury her in a building site, leaving only the eyes exposed, with a puddle of tears forming slightly to the left of them. The daughter becomes catatonic and must be carted away by men in white. The son turns into a fanatic abstract painter who will cover a canvas, à la Yves Klein, with solid blue paint, and then urinate on it—abstract peeing, no doubt. The mother becomes nymphomaniacal, cruising about in her sports car and picking up youths, singly or in pairs, to have intercourse with—either back at their pads, or in a ditch beside a church. In between, she looks straight into the camera and emits a fearful howl. The father gives away his factory to the workers, goes to the railway station and almost follows a trick into the men’s room; instead, he throws off his clothes then and there and hurries off to a wilderness, glimpses of which have appeared, like a refrain, throughout the film to the accompaniment of quotations from the Bible. Mother-naked, father faces the camera and emits the howl mother emitted before him. The end.

But do not for a moment assume that the story proceeds by any sort of narrative logic. It jumps around in fragmented Godardian non sequiturs that arise from nowhere and trail off into nothing. At the slightest sign of a little consecutive action, Pasolini whisks us off to some unrelated nonincident, or to that wilderness with cloud shadows scurrying across it and another unrelated biblical quotation streaking across the soundtrack. The film actually begins with a quite ungermane bit of staged cinéma-vérité in which workers are sounded out on their feelings about the factory’s being turned over to them, so that the film proper is a long flashback leading up to this Marxist miracle in Milan.

Nor are you to think that there is anything like meaningful dialogue in Teorema. The advertisements proudly proclaim that though there are only 923 words in the film (it is not clear whether that includes duplicates), it says everything. There is no doubt that it says everything; unfortunately, however, without saying something. Pasolini has declared that the film is largely about the “cage of words” in which we are all cooped up, from which the Stranger, who represents (you have guessed it!) the Divine, extricates us. Yet since there is almost no talk, and what there is comes mostly after the visitation, it would seem that, if cage there be, it is the Stranger who tosses us into it. But, then, a cage of 923 words spread over an hour and a half has bars far enough apart for an elephant to walk through.

What of the visual elements? The color cinematography is handsome to look at, but what is it looking at? Apart from a few brief exteriors, mostly close shots of the actors doing vague, indefinable things. As the Stranger, Terence Stamp is generally sitting around nursing a Mona Lisa smile and reading Rimbaud in a Franco-Italian edition. (Why our liberation from words should be accomplished by a divinity reading words, and why that divinity, even if we grant its being Italian, should not be up on its French, is left unexplained.) The rest of the time he is mounting the rest of the cast, sometimes without the removal of clothes. Truly, God works in mysterious ways.

Behavior here is a series of poses. The daughter vacuously holds out her photograph album to the Stranger and says nothing, perhaps by way of preparation for catatonia. The Stranger and the son look through a book of reproductions of the paintings of Francis Bacon: Rimbaud, Bacon—we see what kind of sexuality the divinity likes in an artist. There are, in fact, a great many male crotch shots in the film, almost as if it were told from the point of view of a homosexual worm. This may account also for the weirdness of the two younger actresses. Mother, we are told, is played by Silvana Mangano. But since she is always, even in bed, wearing thick, chalk-white, heavily rouged and mascaraed pancake makeup, rather like a kabuki mask, she might as well be enacted by Utaemon XIII, or whatever numeral the current star female impersonator of the Kabuki Theater bears. The daughter is played by Anne Wiazemsky, in private life Mme Godard, possessed of the face of a horse, the teeth of a rabbit, and the expression of an amoeba. The combination of intense lack of talent and looks with scenes of hermetic emptiness represents a new high in minimal art, cinematic division.

At a Museum of Modern Art screening of Teorema, Pasolini explained to the audience that the Stranger is “a hypothesis,” the sex “metaphorical,” and the family a typical Milanese, or European, middle-class family. I thought of asking him a biological question: when five members of a typical Milanese middle-class household are metaphorically screwed by a hypothesis, what is the issue? But the answer is obvious: what is begotten is Teorema.

Though the title, quite plainly, is the Italian for “theorem,” people keep referring to the film as “Theorama,” either because they think it is named after the process in which it is shot (like Cinerama, only more divine), or perhaps because they assume the title to be an obscure Greek word meaning “rammed by God.” In discussing the film with the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, I asked what he thought of this mixture of faggotry, Marxism, and Christianity. “Awful,” he said, “but, you know, the second and third ingredients are not to be taken seriously.” And he pointed out that whereas the men don’t come to such bad ends, the women get the works.

Teorema is totally vapid as film, yet might it not be valid as a parable? Frankly, I can’t see how this God (Pasolini has also said—what hasn’t he said?—that the Stranger is not Christ, but “the terrible God of Creation”) reaches those five people: though the mystics have put erotic tropes to good use, I cannot take this by-the-numbers intercourse seriously even as a metaphor. And why do the five react as they do? What is the meaning of their reactions? Why should the buggered son become an action painter ipso facto, and the humped daughter a catatonic? Why not the reverse? Why should the mother become a whore and the servant a saint? Social class can’t be the answer; the father, too, is rich, and he gives away his earthly goods to become an eremite. Why shouldn’t the mother become a painter? She painted her face heavily enough. Why don’t they all become pizza vendors, or clowns in a traveling circus, or a rock group called God’s Very Own or The Grateful Had?

Stamp’s appearance suggests, if anything, a Caravaggio angel. The angel as sexually ambiguous—asexual, bisexual, androgynous—has fascinated pederastic painters and writers. Wallace Fowlie has written about Rimbaud’s “angelism,” and idealized catamite angels appear in works as diverse as those of Cocteau and Allen Ginsberg. It may even be that Teorema is a conscious or unconscious homosexual pun: “Divine” is a favorite epithet among inverts, and the hero-heroine of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers is called Divine. The ritual of the Catholic Church, with its quasi-transvestite garb, its florid panoply, its celibacy, its choirboys, has always appealed to homosexuals; and the sadomasochism that frequently accompanies inversion has found rich pabulum in St. Sebastian and other holy martyrs. The problem with much—though not all—of this art is that the inversion colors the conversion, that God plus sodomy yields a perversion we might call godomy.

This would account for the sessualità metaforica, as Pasolini labeled the sex in Teorema. The homosexual milieu tends to be more promiscuous than the heterosexual (something that heterosexuals often envy), and the easygoing, geometrical way in which this Stranger covers everyone has distinctly homosexual overtones. It further explains his pretty, tight-trousered looks, and why the mother picks up young boys rather than mature men. It might even explain the sadomasochist overtones: the daughter, in her catatonic state, digging her fingernails deep into her palms (felicitous suggestion of the Crucifixion as well!); the servant eating boiled nettles and having herself entombed; the mother being brutally used in a ditch. It’s a metaphoric sexuality all right, but what the metaphor stands for is not all that divine.

Most interesting, however, is the reception Teorema has been getting. In Europe, it became highly controversial, receiving last year in Venice the Prize of the International Catholic Film Office, only to have that Office revoke the prize this year. The film is now being prosecuted in Italy, possibly at the instigation of the Vatican, and Pasolini might have to go to prison. The cultist cinema magazines of Europe have proclaimed Teorema a masterpiece; in America, conversely, it is the reviewers for the mass media that have been most rhapsodic about it. Vincent Canby of the Times, while he clearly disliked the movie, was humbly respectful, advocating that it “should be seen at least twice” for full understanding, and blaming the healthy laughter with which it was greeted by a preview audience not on anything like the film’s absurdity, but on the regular feature at that theater, Baby Love: an audience that had come to see so ribald a work was, in his opinion, obviously unequipped for Pasolini’s profundities.

In the New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt wrote a rave review intended, she tells me, as a put-on. But quotable ironies like “I thank Pasolini and Heaven for it,” by helping its advertisers, lend support to Teorema. A phrase likening the film, no matter how slyly, to “a piece of geometry that the Deity Himself might have thought it wise to spend six days on,” can nicely befuddle the less than ideal reader—aside from putting dangerous ideas into the deity’s head. It used to be a favorite subject of Scholastic disputation whether God, being omnipotent as well as immortal, could destroy himself. That question, at least, has been answered: by making a film like Teorema—easily.

The New Leader, May 26, 1969