Teorema (1968) Poster

(1968)

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7/10
How Pasolini Explained the Movie
prekdahl1 June 2009
Warning: Spoilers
After seeing this movie I was very confused until I read an interview with Pasolini from 1969. In it he said, "I leave it to the spectator…is the visitor God or is he the Devil? He is not Christ. The important thing is that he is sacred, a supernatural being. He is something from beyond." When asked if the members of the family were in some way improved by their encounter with the visitor, he said, "Only in the sense that a man in a crisis is always better than a man who does not have a problem with his conscience. However, the conclusion of the story is negative because the characters live the experience but are not capable of understanding and resolving it. This is the 'lesson' of the movie -- the bourgeoisie have lost the sense of the sacred, and so they cannot solve their own lives in a religious way. But the servant is a peasant, really a person from another era, a pre-industrial era. That is why she is the only one who recognizes the visitor as God, why she alone does not rebuke him when he must leave. When I say God," Pasolini quickly adds, "I do not mean a Catholic God. He could belong to any religion, a peasant religion. All religions are really peasant religions. That is why religion is in crisis today. We are passing from a peasant world to an industrial world. But a world does not die, so the peasant civilization lives within us, buried within us. It is buried, along with the sense of the sacred, within the factory owner and his family in 'Teorema.'" ... "The father almost does (learn from his truly religious experience). He takes off his clothes and, like Saint Francis, leaves all material things behind. When he reaches the desert, which represents the ascetic life he has been trying to gain, he is not capable of living a mystical experience, as Saint Francis was, because he is historically made in another manner. He arrives almost to the limit of being saved, but he doesn't make it. It's very important that the middle-class sees its own errors and suffers for them."

I would have to say that the movie is a failure, since I think it would be pretty much impossible for a viewer to grasp that interpretation after seeing the movie once, without exposure to Pasolini's thought. However, it has some beautiful and haunting passages, and the movie stays in your mind for a long time after you see it.
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6/10
An Insightful, Important (but flawed) Film
eldiran-2423425 June 2018
As always with Pasolini, we get clumsy acting, dialogue and camera work, though here the story is so important and vital that I've given it more stars than it aesthetically deserves. A stranger appears within a wealthy Italian family, is seduced/seduces each of them--old and young, women and men--and they are all changed by his (its) presence. Though Terence Stamp is perfect physically for the androgynous/bisexual angel, he is a bit adrift among Pasolini's amateurish melodramatic and kitschy handling of film-making. I recommend it ONLY for the brave and rare portrayal of Connection/Love as genderless
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7/10
surprisingly trite
dissidenz10 May 2005
This is Pasolini's primary anti-bourgeoisie film and is sort of a complementary companion of Luis Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie." While Bunuel's film attacks the European post-war middle class (slightly different from America's middle class, though just as apathetic and selfish) with mockery, humiliation, and eventually destruction, Pasolini takes a more soulful route, revealing the hidden desires of a class stifled by social dogma and propriety. Rather than turn them into effigy, he allows them to have epiphanies, realizing their inner hollowness, and taking different paths to self-fulfillment. "Teorema" means "theorem," and in this case, the mysterious, beautiful stranger embodied by Terrence Stamp offers proof of a certain Italian bourgeois family's misgivings. Pasolini here offers a lucid statement, less political than Bunuel, but just as poetic. His execution, however, is dry and hokey, as Stamp encounters each family member almost mathematically. While the actors provide genuine emotion (particuarly in facial expressions, which Pasolini, in his entire body of work, has shown overwhelming appreciation for), the structure of the film is so tight that he almost sucks the life right out of his message. It's a curious film, though, not completely lacking in entertainment value. In a way, it plays out like a sonnet or other tightly structured poem type. Recommended is "Porcile," made by Pasolini, with similar themes, but presented more organically.
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9/10
An Angel With Terence Stamp's Face
uhmartinez-phd29 November 2007
Warning: Spoilers
Angel or demon? In any case, things are never going to be the same again. The arrival of the stranger as a catalyst and in Pier Paolo Pasolini's hands, eyes and heart a socio-sexual political fable as profound as it is outrageous. The idea of the creature that breaks into the deepest corners of our existence has been told countless times with different objectives in mind. Here, an indictment (even if hopelessly affectionate) of the new upper classes. The operative word is "new" due to the fact that we're in Italy and the "upper" classes have always been so for centuries at least. A past of Emperors, Princes and Popes. The new ones have an American slant in as much as they are determined by financial power. Terence Stamp is an angel/demon of extraordinary beauty and sexual might. Nobody will be indifferent to him and he will have in hand the handle to the door leading up or leading down. From the Industrialist/Head of the family, a superb Massimo Girotti, to the servant, a fantastic Laura Betti who's character is as submissive as it is allegorical will open up (physically and emotionally) to the stranger. Silvana Mangano, dressed in Valentino and Pucci since the early morning demeans herself in a moment that it's pure Pasolini. It is bizarre, in 2007, to imagine audiences flocking to see a movie like this but specialized audiences brought in main stream audiences to this wonderful rarity. A film with a voice, an intellectual document of its day. For fearless adventurers this film is compulsive viewing.
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There's something haunting about "Teorema"...
Benedict_Cumberbatch7 August 2009
"There are only 923 words spoken in "Teorema" - but it says everything!", brags the tagline. It makes some sense, since Pasolini's film feels like a rhythmic visual poem with scattered dialogue. "Teorema" looks and feels like a haunting silent film integrated with sparse dialogue - failed attempts of communication and change among the characters.

A beautiful and enigmatic visitor (a young Terence Stamp, one of the intriguing, almost androgynous cult sex figures of the 60's, along the lines of a Udo Kier and others) seduces and then leaves each member of a bourgeois family. The father (Massimo Girotti, of Visconti's "Ossessione"), the mother (Silvana Mangano, "Death in Venice"), the daughter (Anne Wiazemsky, of Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthazar" and Godard's then wife), the son (Andrés José Cruz Soublette) and even the housemaid (Laura Betti, best actress at the Venice Film Festival for this performance) are all altered by the visitor's sexual presence in their lives, and each will try to find salvation or catharsis once they're abandoned. Their ways can be seen as an allegory of the fears and misconceptions of those trapped in their own conventions, and the tragic consequences of their failed attempts to get away - after the visitor, an hedonistic angel of death, tricked them with false hopes of sexual and emotional liberation. At least, that's how I see it - which I wouldn't dare to claim as an ultimate view on it. As enigmatic and haunting the images in "Teorema" are, they ask for repeated viewings. And just the fact that they give you enough interest for a second look, it's quite a feat. An interesting, cerebral cinematic exercise, to say the least. 8.5/10.
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7/10
From far out in the center of the naked lake The loon's cry rose. It was the cry of someone who owned very little.
XxEthanHuntxX13 March 2021
A somewhat enigmatic and ambiguously symbolic film by Pasolini. But it's meaning(s) seems obvious. First of all, that money do not promptly bring eternal happiness, you have to find your own meaning in life. The rich bourgoise family have money but no purposes, haunted by depression, and live utterly pathetic lives. The stranger, representing a kind of god, a prophet, a mad variable that bursts into bourgeois normality, irrational that upsets the rational, extraordinary that destroys the ordinary and every bourgeois convention. Terence Stamp is perfect in the role of the stranger who represents change, inner discovery and the awareness of the inner emptiness to be overcome. The bourgeois family, laid bare and by now alone with themself, will not be able to overcome the knowledge of their own nullity, it will implode without escape in a definitive explosion. Everyone falls into the void of a useless past, apart from the servant who accepts a destiny of holiness and manages to find a real role in the world.
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9/10
Teorema and Apartment Zero
jpm-onfocus5 January 2017
Watching Teorema for the first time in 2017 it gave me a chill by the influence this movie clearly had on "Apartment Zero" (1988) - A film I only discovered last year but it has become one of my favorites. I know "Apartment Zero" so well by now, that at times it felt (felt is the operative word)I was in their same universe. They are both socio-political psycho sexual tales. Terence Stamp and Hart Bochner even look related to each other. Colin Firth represents a Country in decadence with a past of elegant pride, Massimo Girotti represents, for me, exactly the same things for different reasons in different ways but they are both seduceable in the eyes of the stranger. To think that Teorema was made in 1968 and Apartment Zero in 1988, boggles the mind. Mine anyway.
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7/10
Another Pasolini's elusive work
lasttimeisaw25 November 2013
After my bittersweet reaction towards Pasolini's TRILOGY OF LIFE (1971-1974), I tend to be a little heedful to wade into his canon, so not until vaguely 6 years after, I find a chance to watch his another work of indecipherable philosophy, THEOREM, which is introduced by a wobbly-shot interview in front of a factory and then segues with a silent canto under sepia tint, flickeringly introduces the family members of the story to be told.

The father (Girotti) is the factory owner, with his wife (Mangano), daughter (Wiazemsky), son (Soublette) and the maid (Betty) lives in a stately mansion, one day, arrives a young visitor (Stamp), whose occult charisma and amiable endowment are too glaring to resist, and one after another he seduces all the family members (starts with the maid and ends with the patriarch), then he leaves, but his benedictory actions precipitate the ripple effects which alter everyone's mindset.

The maid suddenly acquires an ability to cure and even conducts Ascension-like behavior; the daughter suffers from lovesickness and the son gets burgeoning inspiration for his art but also feels being enfettered; the matriarch constantly scouts out young boys for carnal pleasure and the patriarch starts to haunt himself with utter nudism. It's hard to conceive what's behind all these esoteric metaphysics after just watched the film once, but it is hardly an engaging one to invite revisiting.

To dissect a Pasolini's film, its religious overtones are the elephant in the room, is Stamp the God himself or a godsend messenger to endow this quintet with his pansexuality? Another contentious part is how to read the aftermath? Among those five people, only the maid belongs to a lower class, but it is her, seems to possess a supernatural gift eventually, while the bourgeois family is entrapped in respective shackles and the ending shows no way out for any of them. It can be interpreted as a lash on the decaying middle class, only the poor and the proletarians are the beneficiaries from God's gift.

Morricone's accompanying score alters from eerie ambient to rich concerto, plus Mozart's Requiem, stratifies the film's mythical layers of causes and effects. Stamp's sex appeal has been magnified to the maximum with a contentious camera faithfully captures his congeniality and deadly smile. Betty is a standout among the receivers, gives an intent thousand-yard stare in her hallowed supremacy. By comparison bigger names like Mangano and Girotti never fully register too much into their slightly hollow revelations, maybe it is all intentionally disposed, and Pasolini remains to be an ineffaceable enigma to me.
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10/10
The collapse of the bourgeosie
zetes31 May 2002
Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. He is not generally recognized as such, but he ought to be and hopefully will be someday. At least in the world of cinema, he should have an equal position to any of the great masters.

Teorema is just one reason why. It's not my personal favorite Pasolini film, but it's easily one of the best films I've ever seen. Unlike my favorites, Mamma Roma, The Decameron, and Arabian Nights, Teorema is a highly abstract film imbued in symbolism. Not that there isn't symbolism in those other films. The difference is that, in Teorema, the human element is reduced. The characters in the film are symbolic members of a typical bourgois family, the mother, father, son, and daughter (and maid). One day a young man arrives at their home. Apparently they know him. They received a letter that he would be there, and they didn't think twice about it. This man (played by Terence Stamp) arrives during a party. When a friend asks the daughter who that boy is, she replies: "Just a boy."

Over the next few days, this "boy" seduces every member of the family. He seems angelic, offering help selflessly whenever anyone feels hurt or isolated or sick. He speaks little - indeed, there is hardly any dialogue in the entire film - but is always there for the needy. The film begins with a quotation from the Bible, meant to compare the bourgeosie to the Jews wandering lost in the desert after they escaped from Egypt. The mysterious boy, is he God?

Or, conversely, is he a golden calf? Or is he the devil himself? I was unsure of whether Stamp could play the character when I first read up on the film (I had read the first bit of the novel, written concurrently with the film by Pasolini, before I watched the film), but, as Teorema progressed, I realized that he was perfect. Stamp has a face hanging uniquely between evil and kind-hearted. His eyes are cherubic, but his grin is diabolical. What, exactly, is this young man here to do?

Well, I won't ruin it for you if you haven't seen it (plus, I think I've gone on enough). Suffice it to say that the revelations and effects that are brought out by the boy's presence are profound and quite brilliant. Anyone interested in European art films of the era owes it to themselves to see Teorema. If you are more into realism, especially if you didn't like Teorema, move onto Mamma Roma, The Gospel According to Matthew, and the Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights).
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6/10
My brief review of the film
sol-9 July 2005
An interesting film, told mostly in images, with sparse dialogue throughout and a lot of attention directed to colour, it makes an intriguing watch, even if not a highly satisfying one. With limited dialogue, the character development becomes light, and although the characters do change in the course of the film, we never knew them to begin with very well, so the change leaves little impact. What Pasolini is trying to say is quite ambiguous, and it is frustrating to watch, as the second half the film gives an opportunity for much meandering and without it having much meaning. The art direction and Pasolini's lighting choices are excellent, the music choices are great, and the film is, for its first half, relatively interesting. But the changes the characters go through seem all over-the-place, and therefore it is hard to decipher whether Pasolini is trying to say anything at all.
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5/10
An interesting premise...a so and so film
cesarat375 February 2021
"Teorema" has it's pros and cons well balanced; on one hand it's a very original, creative, different film to everything i've seen before, but it's also dull and rather repetitive, with some of the scenes bordering on the ridiculous. Technically, it's not a very competent film either, and it looks quite amateurish, with bad camerawork and sloppy editing here and there. In spite of all this, I liked the mystical, quasi religious tone of this movie, the sense of mystery and desolation within this (strange) tale. A handsome young man, whom we only know as "The Visitor" (Stamp) arrives at the home of an upper class Milanese family. He befriends and has sex with all the members of the family (the maid included), and then he suddenly leaves as he arrived, without explanation.

Director Pier Paolo Pasolini explained in an interview that "The Visitor" represented God, and so he transforms every member of the family with his visit. My take on all this is that "The Visitor" makes the family aware of who they truly are, he reveals their inner or intimate nature, instead of just them playing a "role" in the bourgeois society. Thus, the maid becomes a saint, the mother becomes promiscuous, the daughter becomes severely depressed, and the father and son reveal their homosexuality and also go insane towards the end of the film... As a Marxist, Pasolini makes the maid the only "positive" character of the movie, suggesting that the presence of God/The Visitor has made her capable of making miracles, while the bourgeois family indulges in destructive behavior after they meet him. Once again, and, ironically, an atheist and Socialist like Pasolini has made one of the most religious films i've seen.
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9/10
One of the best Italian films of the decade
MOscarbradley15 March 2017
At the beginning of "Teorema", in a wordless, sepia-tinged montage, we are introduced to almost all the main characters in Pasolini's film. It's a clever device, almost Hitchcockian, and it could be the beginning of a thriller, though being a Pasolini film we know this won't be a thriller. The character who doesn't appear in this montage is played by Terence Stamp but suddenly there he is right in the middle of things and his affect on everyone is profound. Who is he and why is he here? It's never made clear, of course. Although a very physical presence his role is allegorical. Is he an angel, (there is a strong religious element in the picture), or a devil or simply a seducer since he does seem to have sex with everyone in the family, male and female, including the maid who ends up levitating and performing miracles. He certainly affords everyone a form of release, turning their lives upside down and with it their bourgeoisie pretensions. If we are going to tear down the bourgeoisie we may as well do it with sex; it's a lot more fun than beating them to death.

Stamp, of course, remains the most beautiful thing on screen though Silvana Mangano as the mother gives him a run for his money. No-one really has to act; all they simply have to do is respond to Pasolini's camera and, with no real narrative structure, that's fairly easy. Sex may be Pasolin's weapon of choice but the film is quite clearly a Marxist 'fantasy' and is also very obviously the work of a gay director. I'm not so sure anymore if it's the masterpiece I thought it was all those years ago bu it stands up remarkably well and remains one of the great Italian films of its decade.
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7/10
Not for all tastes
ardavan_sh200618 December 2011
i'm afraid that "teorema" is a complicated movie & it's not like Pasolini's "trilogy of life" which could attract the mainstream viewers.

this movie has an obscure structure with a mysterious stranger who makes everything upside-down. (who's that stranger? another Billy Budd?(with the same actor), why he sexually influences them all ?)..

it could be interpreted as Pasolini's attack to the fake solidarity in a bourgeois-class family. what i like particularly in "teorema" is Pasolini's masterwork with color, landscapes n architecture.

Depends on your taste & recommended for Pier Paolo's fans,only.
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3/10
a massively confused and dull allegory on bourgeois deconstruction
Quinoa198410 September 2007
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.
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"A theorem is a proposition that has been or is to be proved on the basis of explicit assumptions...
Galina_movie_fan21 September 2006
..Proving theorems is a central activity of mathematicians. Note that "theorem" is distinct from "theory". (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Teorema" (1968) is a fable that tells how a handsome young man (extremely attractive Terrence Stamp "with the eyes of an angel and the grin of the devil") stays as a guest in the house of a wealthy factory owner and seduces one after another all members of the household - the maid, the teenagers son and daughter, the wife, and the father (in this order). When released in 1968, the film had divided believers and atheists as much as critics. Some of Pasolini's comrades-Marxists were also infuriated by this attack on their ideology. Many viewers were disturbed by its removing sexual taboos even though sex is handled very tastefully. It is more a symbol of connection and closeness to God (or it could be to Devil, we may only guess). Made almost forty years ago, "Teorema" seems to be simple and puzzling at the same time. It reminded me Ingmar Bergman's movies from his "Trilogy of Faith" which sums up Bergman's own philosophy regarding religion and God – "God has never spoken because He does not exist". In Bergman's world where God does not exist, communication and understanding are not possible and everyone is locked in their loneliness like in a cage. In Pasolini's film, God sends his angel to a chosen family. He has spoken to them and known them but then he left them. Did they become happier? Is that possible for a human to keep on living like nothing happen after the encounter with God?

I watched "Teorema" for the first time few weeks ago but I still think about it trying to understand what "theorem" Pasolini tried to prove? I also was thinking about the films that were inspired by or reminded me a lot about "Teorema". I've mentioned Bergman already. Luis Bunuel with "Nazarin", "Viridiana"," Belle de jour" (1967) - the mother's transformation in "Teorema" reminds about the film immediately, and "Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie"(1972) come to mind. I was also reminded of Andrei Tarkovsky. The visual style, camera work and the use of music in "Teorema" seem similar with Russian Master's. His last film, "Sacrifice" may be the one closest to Pasolini's film.

I would never say that everyone must watch "Teorema". It is a very unusual film that could be easily dismissed as ridiculous and dated or it would be thought of as absolutely brilliant and mysterious. I have not decided yet but I can't forget it.

P.S. November 29, 2006 - It's been several months since I saw "Teorema" and now I believe that it is brilliant and belongs to the the best films ever made. One can meditate forever on its depths and mystery, and that's the sign of a great work of Art for me.
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10/10
This film is Pasolini's best and most explosive.
didier-2016 November 2005
This for me is Pasolini's best film. I return to it again and again. I could not agree less with the first comment posted here. It's Pasolini's most politically biting film by far, most on the line, most provocative. All out directness, no compromising. The assault on the refreshing (for a Pasolini film), depiction of modern life, takes place with an arresting synthesis of ultra left wing demands for total revolution alongside Pasolini's preoccupations with the mysterious insides of religion. The enigma/stranger is said to be the symbolic "Christ" not the devil, as the previous commenter thinks. This is what gives the film it's bite, as the whole complexity of Christian revelation & conversion, is extraordinarily concocted into this figure who transforms all he touches, provoking collapse and crisis in all and everyone. The anatomy of the failure of the bourgeoisie entity is total. There is no escape from the social contradiction of the condition - Pasolini points to all the usual routes of escape and follows the logic to it's inevitable failure in each case.- he knows his stuff. -

The film came out in 1968, and for me very much belongs to that white hot moment, when Euopean artistic dissenters demanded absolute social change. It sits along side films like Goddard's Le Chiniose. It's message still resonates today, in our landscape of spectral and banished Marx. Interstingly, this film was nominated for some award from the Vatican when it came out, which is amusing because Pasolini spent much time being condemned by them. It also touches on the interesting game Pasolini played when tackling the social politics of his Italy. By playing with religious ideas, Pasolini could court the Vatican's responses, but he also smuggles in hidden and ambiguous meanings which are reminiscent of the sort of game playing that went on between film makers and Communist governments in the old Eastern Block. For me that game playing is at Pasolini's best in this film, where the enigma (Christ) is a sexual seducer of men, women and adolescent boys and girls. Sex, madness and the Christian mystery as Marxist revolution- its a bomb! Be blown away........
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6/10
Peculiar, artistic, giftedly carried out - but not interesting
BeneCumb22 October 2012
For me, Italian and Swedish artistic films have a lot in common, beginning with static scripts and ending with poker-faced performers. Usually are Pasolini's films different from this pattern, but not with Teorema where the above mentioned features are fully visible. Of course, directing and camera work are great and the actors-actresses are at least good, if not more, but I am not very much into profundity connected with religion and sexuality. And boredom among the rich, long dialogs with literary connections, background classical or church music - all this has been used before and after Pasolini. And those endless scenes without any text… Well, the ending was also not according to my taste.

Luckily, the film is only 1,5 hours, but I could recommend it only for selective , like-minded audience.
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8/10
The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie
jotix10010 May 2006
Warning: Spoilers
"Teorema", directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini is a an obscure film that will not gratify the casual viewer because the use of symbolism in the narrative. This film is problematic, but we are given clues at the beginning of it, so it makes a bit of a difference putting all the elements together to come to a conclusion.

It was significant this film was made in 1968 at the height of the students' unrest in Paris and other places. Pasolini was influenced by what was happening as he makes a stand about what he perceived what was the evil in the society in which he lived. The film begins with a discussion about the role of the bourgeoisie and how it affected the workers. We also observe an industrial complex in Northern Italy that is empty of all activity. Like most Italian film makers, Pasolini's leanings were left of center and the communist emblem is clearly visible in the movie.

The scene changes to Lucia and Paolo's villa. They are having a party in which the young man, or "the visitor", is seen lounging among the guests. This man, a handsome stranger, is seen in later scenes as having sexual relations with all the members of the wealthy family, including the maid. It's evident the father realizes what's going on between the visitor and his wife, as well as with the son and the daughter because he himself is involved with the young man.

When the visitor announces suddenly his departure, the family falls apart. One of the most affected is the maid, who goes back to a place in the country where she sits for a quite some time before levitating above the house, creating a religious event in which she is probably seen as a saint, or at least miraculous. Emilia is taken to a place where she is being buried alive and her tears form a puddle on the ground.

Back in the house, everyone else is affected in a different fashion. Odetta, is perhaps the one suffering the most because she falls into a comatose state clenching her fist around an object that appears to have been given to her by the visitor. Lucia, the mother, goes out in her car looking for boys for casual sex and the father also is seen at Milan's main railway station stripping bare after he has been seen cruising a male hustler, only to be seen later on running naked through a sort of barren field.

Pasolini works as a minimalist in this story that seems to be saying the evil in that society is the rampant materialism. Only by shedding one's own accumulated wealth can one achieve salvation, as is the case with Paolo, the father. Or maybe being humiliated like Lucia is also a way of redemption. All these ideas float throughout the film with the music of Mozart's Requiem and the interesting cinematography of Giuseppe Rizzolini, who shot the film in long takes.

Terence Stamp made an interesting appearance as the visitor/angel who knows all the people in the villa intimately. Silvana Mangano gives an excellent reading of her Lucia, a rich Italian woman. Massimo Girotti, a handsome actor, makes an excellent contribution with his Paolo, and Laura Betti, is equally effective as the mysterious Emilia.

Although this is not one of Pasolini's most approachable film, it's worth a look. It's easy to dismiss Pasolini and Teorema, but this film is not a failure.
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6/10
A rather confusing film
frankde-jong9 July 2019
Teorema is about an (anonymous) visitor. After his (sexuel) relationship with several menbers of a bourgeoisie family, the life of the family members never will be the same.

There are other films in which a stranger brings to the surface subcutaneous tensions in a family. I mention "Cape Fear" (1991, Martin Scorsese).

In that film we talk about an evil stranger. In "Teorema" the stranger is nice, with even some touches of holines. After all 4 years earlier Pasolini made his version of the gospel according to Matthew ("Il vangelo secondo Matteo" , 1964).

The saint, as we interpret him as such, has a strong homo(sexual) appetite. In combining (homo)sexuality with christianity, Pasolini resembles the Dutch writer Reve.
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10/10
The Stranger Who Came to Our House
nycritic21 April 2006
Warning: Spoilers
Writing about this strange film is going to be, for me, the equivalent of walking a tightrope 1,000 feet above the ground with no rope to secure me if and once I fall. I can't place Pasolini's TEOREMA because I'm not quite sure what it's trying to tell me. It's the same reaction, albeit different, I got from watching Bergman's PERSONA the first time -- it left me with a feeling of being suspended in thin air over a field of terrifying white extending itself out into infinity; I had nothing to hold on to, nothing to help me stand on firm, defined ground, and a universe of blankness just there, indifferent as to what I felt or thought or knew or ignored.

Pasolini is one of the most difficult directors the history of cinema has created. His "infamy" after having produced SALO is on a global level: anyone who mentions this movie will create a quiet sense of panic due to the unflinching nature of Sade's story of torture and extreme capitalism devouring humankind.

The following review will apply only to my first view of the film: When an irresistible force comes to visit a community -- in this case, a family -- of people whose lives are mundane in the extreme (nothing wrong with that, of course), the effect is of a total surrender. Terence Stamp is this enigmatic person, a young man who looks like any other young man of his time: he might as well be going to college, since he has this look about him that implies as such. But his presence, his stare that seems not from this world at times since it looks right into you, causes the housekeeper to be the first one to give into him even as she tries to kill herself. Why would she do such a thing? The movie doesn't address this issue -- maybe as he looked into her, he took something indelible from her conscience, something that she still held on to. Or maybe he saw right into her soul and that is something most people cannot bear.

Which is probably why the daughter goes insane. As a matter of fact, all of the characters -- the units in this family, the smallest form of society -- fall prey to an insanity that once he departs, devours them whole. It's as if he were this wonderful narcotic being who shows them their inner truth through the act of sex, and then, once this being had fulfilled his mission, like a psychic vampire, it withdrew completely from their lives. Without this wonderful person, who can they turn to? The son has no one -- his paintings are what he considers rubbish and he wallows in self-hatred. The mother also has no one to turn to except anonymous lovers who use her and leave her abandoned on the way to Milan. The father loses his complete sense of masculine self, reneges his business, peels away his clothes in the middle of a train station as he cruises another man who resembles this stranger, and later embarks on a trek into unknown territory.

I'm wondering, then, why the maid, who was the one who almost killed herself, was allowed this complete transformation of her character, turning into a saint who prepares herself for what seems like a rebirth. My guess is that she being of "humble" birth, a woman not unlike Mary Mother of Jesus, she'd also be stripped of any ties to the material world that could hinder a spiritual evolution. I become more certain that the stranger saw a potential evil in her, withdrew it; she felt the initial horror following this extraction and even tried to commit suicide but was aided to withstand his presence and later departure and this allowed her to not only survive, but Become.

Now, cinematically, TEOREMA follows a broken narrative with stylish flash-cuts that occur out of time and sequence: a style very much of the time it was made. The recurring image of a desert is something we are presented here and there, but doesn't correlate to anything at first. The actual moment when the stranger meets the sister and her mother is also seen in sepia tones, in a dream-like fashion. The actual progression of the story seems sloppy -- snippets here and there that later add up to a whole. Dialog is kept to a bare minimum and the characters speak in extended monologues that look odd but reflect their inner nature, their reaction to his presence, and then their reaction to his departure.

TEOREMA is an experimental film from start to finish, frustrating at times, and one that needs subsequent viewings to be understood, although I wouldn't be surprised if this abstract movie doesn't garner we understand it fully, but just experience it as it is: a movie equivalent to Musique Concrete.
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7/10
A weird but engrossing drama
ashishjoshi-045171 June 2021
Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema (Theorem) is a strange and mystifying film that explores among other themes the emptiness and spiritual isolation of modern bourgeois existence.

Terence Stamp plays the nameless stranger who effortlessly insinuates himself into the life of a well-off Milanese family while their guest for a few days. One by one all the family fall under his spell. He dallies with the sexually repressed mother, seduces the over-protected daughter, charms the maid and has the same powerful effect on the son and the father. Unable to cope with life after his departure the family end up destroying themselves in various ways.

Released in 1968 the film had a lukewarm reception at the box office. Most critics found its theme of a spiritually joyless modern world too abstruse and hard to understand. Yet it is a film that makes a powerful statement about the state of modern existence.

Pasolini was a director who was unafraid to tackle themes that other directors found too risky or tended to avoid. His films used mostly non-professional actors and often focused on overt political and sexually-charged content. He also wrote novels and poetry.

Trivia: Laura Betti, who plays the maid, won the Volpi Cup as Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for this film.
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2/10
Over the top histrionics
ctarlen27 March 2002
A neurotic bourgeois family and their weird maid are visited by a divine Terrence Stamp who lounges around with his legs spread. Pasolini gives us lots of crotch shots. Every member of this messed up brood fall in love with Terrance. Then he leaves. Miracles happen. Funny miracles. and brooding and moaning and groaning and hysteria from the family. The maid levitates. I laughed.

Why does anyone take this seriously?
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10/10
Very interesting
msultan3 January 2004
I can understand how people might react negatively to this movie

(and judging by other posts, some do), but I found this movie one

of the most interesting and penetrating (hmm, no pun intended)

movies I've seen for a while. It has the right art-mystery-allegory- satire dosage, and they are very well weighed. It was just

fantastic. I am not sure why IMDB categorized it under drama. I

couldn't help laughing the whole way through. I don't think this was

supposed to be taken too seriously, since it was pretty predictable,

after all. It was just really interesting to see the way Pasolini plays

with the Bible, Tolstoy (if only he could watch it!), emotions, and

social satire. Mozart's haunting Requiem crowned it perfectly.
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6/10
Another fascinating Pasolini film
rbverhoef4 December 2006
When it comes to a Pier Paolo Pasolini film I am never sure whether to recommend it or not. I like his films, even his bad ones, because they are different. That, at least, makes them never boring and always gives us something to talk about. 'Teorema' is probably one of his best examples. I did not particularly like this film but was fascinated from start to finish.

The first half hour shows a handsome visitor (Terence Stamp) in a big land house. There he makes love to all member of the household: the maid, the father, the mother, the sister and the brother. Then the apparent stranger has to go. The physical love which all of them shared with the visitor, most obviously seen as a divine figure, means major changes for all of them, seen in the second part of this film.

I could say more or could have said less, it does not change very much on whether you will see this film. As in many of his films Pasolini keeps a certain distance from his material, as does the music, which here brings something extra to the fascinating things on screen. There is hardly any dialogue and when it comes it seems like talking in code. Most people understand what Pasolini is trying to do here, I guess, and that makes it one of his easier films to watch. That there is not as much sex and violence as in many of his other films helps as well.

'Teorema' is a fascinating film, maybe too slow for quite some viewers, but I can't imagine someone to be really bored with this interesting piece of cinema. You might even really like it.
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2/10
I hated it but don't despise it
Shuggy14 March 2010
Warning: Spoilers
Someone said you should look at your mood before rating this film. I had to walk an unnecessary kilometre to buy my ticket, someone was using a cellphone during the credits, and the WHOLE film was shown in a too-wide aspect ratio - after I had alerted the organisers, having seen the problem while watching the splash-page, over and over. (It was shown rather dimly off a DVD.) So I have to give the film a huge discount for my grumpiness.

I didn't like it. I don't despise it, because I think Pasolini was sincere in making it, not trying to put one over us with pretentious piffle (cf Fellini). It's certainly not the worst film ever made, not dishonest, condescending or manipulative, just slow, opaque and uninvolving (but maybe the last is just me; see above).

My (and most people's?) disconnect from Teorema is that we can no longer identify with the Italian Catholic guilt that overcame most of the family after succumbing to Terence Stamp's undoubted charms. He had sex with them (usually at their instigation - to say "he seduced them" is to exaggerate wildly) and a reaction is to be expected, but catatonia? Levitation and autointerment? Bad art? (OK, bad art.)

And is there really a volcanic desert handy to the Milan (?) railway station that anyone can walk to naked without being intercepted?

So when it (finally!) said "FINE" I said "Fine by me."
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