Teorema

By: Amos Lassen

"TEOREMA"
The Visitor
Amos Lassen

A middle-class Italian family in Milan is about to experience the most intense and mind-bending experience of their entire lives. After allowing a stranger known only as "The Visitor" (Terrence Stamp) into their home, the family is has a feeling of awe, lust and yearning for their new guest. What follows is a series of sexual encounters between the mysterious figure and every member of the family including the mother, Lucia (Silvana Mangano), who is burdened by sexual inhibition, the troubled father, Paolo (Massimo Girotti), and the zealously religious servant, Emilia (Laura Betti).
Each person in the family has issues that the stranger helps uncover and heal. Pietro, the son, is highly sensitive and overwhelmed by his emotions. He struggles with anxiety, low self-esteem and indecision, all of which are later replaced with a strong, impenetrable sense of confidence by the visitor. The maid is on the verge of committing suicide and plans on hanging herself with a hose when she is found and consoled by the visitor. finds and consoles her. He has sex with the naïve daughter, Odetta (Anne Wiazemsky), allowing her to break out of her shell and limited worldview.
The Visitor also helps relieve the mother's sexual frustration and caters to the father who feels defeated by his illness. He does this seemingly selflessly, without asking for or expecting anything in return from the family. It is pleasure, fulfilment and joy for everyone in the house. However, this joy soon becomes pain and horror when he leaves their home as discreetly and inexplicably as when he first came it. The family is left in grief and despair, searching for liberation and a return to what was there before he was there for just a few days.
"Teorema" is about the power of hippy love over capitalist wealth. With his virtually wordless screenplay adapting his own novel, Pasolini makes sure his story is a well told and entertaining.

Stamp has said that he made "Teorema" because he bumped into childhood crush Silvana Mangano on a street in Rome. The family is basically a film about Terence Stamp's crotch. He seems omniscient, otherworldly, haughty, and rather amused. The film was banned on obscenity charges because of it is that politically subversives and contains allusions to homosexuality. Pasolini said that his entire project with the film was to underline the poetic qualities of "a world at its end".