Teorema brought me to a point I usually don't get to watching films; I felt like one of these younger (or just less exposed to) film-goers who complain about the classic foreign films of the new-waves being too slow and boring. I didn't want to though, as I've seen some of Pier Paolo Pasolini's past work that did impress me quite a lot (Mamma Roma and especially Hawks and Sparrows come to mind). But Teorema is a work that treats ambiguity and allegory like it's not as assets but defense mechanisms.
Pasolini has a theme in mind, or maybe a bunch, and they're predicated on some mysterious figure (Terence Stamp, dubbed terribly into Italian, as apparently the rest of the mostly Italian actors are, and who has little range aside from looking like a handsome Brit) who appears to a bourgeois family one day during a party, and soon comes the comfort/sex of every member of the family (save for the father, that, among other things, is never made clear). Then, as mysteriously as he arrived, he leaves, and the family goes into a tailspin, as the daughter (Ann Wiazemsky, who makes her fairly detached performance in Au hasard Balthazar look like a telenovela comparatively) goes into a catatonic state after seeing his picture, the wife goes batty and aimless, the servant goes to some farm and sits without eating on a bench, and the father also goes into a quasi-shock.
It's a maddening film, and not a successful one, because Pasolini doesn't even do anything minimal to make us give one tenth of one crap about any of the characters. Is he condemning or trying to understand these emotionally deprived bourgeois, who male or female jump all over 'The Visitor' (un-erotically, I might add, and where's the fun if it's Pasolini), and then break apart when he's not around? The performances might be bad more-so because of the script than because of a dearth of talent: Stamp has done better things, as Silvana Magnano has, but there characters have nothing to do except look awestruck, withdrawn, or in a daze that food or, to be sure, running a factor can quench. It's not that Pasolini even does a failure as a director here- there's one shot especially, as the father walks across the train station in a long tracking shot in a different film stock, that is extraordinary. But even Pasolini's style is off, be it because of lack of budget or by choice, as it becomes noticeable and stupid to suddenly see the change in film-stock from the train-station long shot of the father taking off his clothes, then cutting to an obvious in-studio shot.
Maybe acid European art-house fanatics (and I say fanatics as opposed to fans) might find some great depth in Pasolini's method to deconstructing his characters, but it's really an exercise in frustration without a pay-off. There's none of the morbid, scalding-hot underlying wit of a real controversial work like Salo, and once the substance starts to irk with the lack of exposition or real depth past the flailing poetic lines, one would try and look at the style for some artistic merit. But Pasolini also compromises himself by adding in supposedly subliminal (or naggingly intentional) shots of a blackened desert at times as a character stares off or just during a random moment, and there's other bits of terrible editing as well (it might have been more effective, for example, if the shot panning up to the woman suspended in the sky didn't suddenly cut jarringly to the on-lookers at the farm). And the cinematography almost seems to try to be compensating for what is lacking in the material with many a magisterial but often self-important shot of a character walking for minutes at length for no purpose.
And saddening good music is put to poor use. Mozart's requiem comes up any time Pasolini wants to garner some extra emotion, and Morricone, while supplanting an unusual and intriguing jazz score, gets a similar treatment with his notes. Teorema is very disappointing, not simply as a work of social critique or religious drama but as a work from a director who can, and did, do better. It might even be his worst film.
Pasolini has a theme in mind, or maybe a bunch, and they're predicated on some mysterious figure (Terence Stamp, dubbed terribly into Italian, as apparently the rest of the mostly Italian actors are, and who has little range aside from looking like a handsome Brit) who appears to a bourgeois family one day during a party, and soon comes the comfort/sex of every member of the family (save for the father, that, among other things, is never made clear). Then, as mysteriously as he arrived, he leaves, and the family goes into a tailspin, as the daughter (Ann Wiazemsky, who makes her fairly detached performance in Au hasard Balthazar look like a telenovela comparatively) goes into a catatonic state after seeing his picture, the wife goes batty and aimless, the servant goes to some farm and sits without eating on a bench, and the father also goes into a quasi-shock.
It's a maddening film, and not a successful one, because Pasolini doesn't even do anything minimal to make us give one tenth of one crap about any of the characters. Is he condemning or trying to understand these emotionally deprived bourgeois, who male or female jump all over 'The Visitor' (un-erotically, I might add, and where's the fun if it's Pasolini), and then break apart when he's not around? The performances might be bad more-so because of the script than because of a dearth of talent: Stamp has done better things, as Silvana Magnano has, but there characters have nothing to do except look awestruck, withdrawn, or in a daze that food or, to be sure, running a factor can quench. It's not that Pasolini even does a failure as a director here- there's one shot especially, as the father walks across the train station in a long tracking shot in a different film stock, that is extraordinary. But even Pasolini's style is off, be it because of lack of budget or by choice, as it becomes noticeable and stupid to suddenly see the change in film-stock from the train-station long shot of the father taking off his clothes, then cutting to an obvious in-studio shot.
Maybe acid European art-house fanatics (and I say fanatics as opposed to fans) might find some great depth in Pasolini's method to deconstructing his characters, but it's really an exercise in frustration without a pay-off. There's none of the morbid, scalding-hot underlying wit of a real controversial work like Salo, and once the substance starts to irk with the lack of exposition or real depth past the flailing poetic lines, one would try and look at the style for some artistic merit. But Pasolini also compromises himself by adding in supposedly subliminal (or naggingly intentional) shots of a blackened desert at times as a character stares off or just during a random moment, and there's other bits of terrible editing as well (it might have been more effective, for example, if the shot panning up to the woman suspended in the sky didn't suddenly cut jarringly to the on-lookers at the farm). And the cinematography almost seems to try to be compensating for what is lacking in the material with many a magisterial but often self-important shot of a character walking for minutes at length for no purpose.
And saddening good music is put to poor use. Mozart's requiem comes up any time Pasolini wants to garner some extra emotion, and Morricone, while supplanting an unusual and intriguing jazz score, gets a similar treatment with his notes. Teorema is very disappointing, not simply as a work of social critique or religious drama but as a work from a director who can, and did, do better. It might even be his worst film.