Teorema (1968) Queer Film (C)

Pasolini’s Teorema unfolds as a cool, allegorical parable set inside a wealthy Milanese household. A mysterious young visitor—beautiful, serene, and unnamed and played, of course, by Terence Stamp —arrives at the family’s villa. His presence exerts an almost supernatural pull. One by one, every member of the household falls into an intimate encounter with him: the mother, the father, the son, the daughter, and even the maid. Each experience him as a kind of revelation—erotic, spiritual, or both.

Just as quietly as he arrived, the visitor departs. His absence detonates the family’s carefully maintained bourgeois order. Each character spirals into a different form of crisis or transformation:

• The father, stripped of meaning, gives away his factory and wanders naked into the desert.
• The mother seeks compulsive affairs to recapture the intensity she felt.
• The son abandons his artistic pretensions and collapses into creative paralysis.
• The daughter retreats into catatonia.
• The maid, the only working‑class figure, becomes a kind of folk saint—performing miracles, levitating, and ultimately being buried alive in a state of ecstatic transcendence.

The film ends not with resolution but with rupture: the bourgeois family disintegrates, while the maid ascends. Pasolini frames the visitor as a catalyst—angelic, demonic, or simply a pure force of desire—whose presence exposes the spiritual emptiness of modern capitalist life.

A controversial personality due to his straightforward style, Pasolini’s legacy remains contentious. Openly gay while also a vocal advocate for heritage language revival, cultural conservatism, and Christian values in his youth, Pasolini became an avowed Marxist shortly after the end of World War II. He began voicing extremely harsh criticism of Italian petty bourgeoisie and what he saw as the Americanization, cultural degeneration, and greed-driven consumerism taking over Italian culture. As a filmmaker, Pasolini often juxtaposed socio-political polemics with an extremely graphic and critical examination of taboo sexual matters. A prominent protagonist of the Roman intellectual scene during the post-war era, Pasolini became an established and major figure in European literature and cinema.

Although he directed The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), Arabian Nights (1974) and Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Teorem was Pasolini’s only movie to address homosexuality directly. Even then, it’s all pretty clinical. Laura Betti as the maid, and a magnificent Silvana Mangano as the mother, do manage to cut through the boredom and the director’s constant didacticism. Only 1964’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew remains as his only watchable film – a real testament to his talent.

Pasolini’s unsolved and extremely brutal abduction, torture, and murder at Ostia in November 1975 prompted an outcry in Italy, where it continues to be a matter of heated debate. Recent leads by Italian cold case investigators suggest a contract killing by the Banda della Magliana, a criminal organization with close links to far-right terrorism, as the most likely cause.

Streaming on YouTube and Amazon prime Video.