Pier Paolo Pasolini
Teorema

I defend the sacred because it is the part of man that least resists the profanation of power, which is most threatened by the institutions of the Churches". "A religious story: a God who arrives in a bourgeois family: beautiful, young, charming, with light blue eyes. And loves everyone: from the father to the servant. "Teorema, as the title indicates, is based on a hypothesis for absurdum. The question is this: if a bourgeois family were visited by a young god, be it Dionysus or Jehovah, what would happen? So I start from a pure hypothesis".

This is how Pasolini explains the title of this film from '68, which is the cinematic version of his novel from the same year.

The film begins with a preview where an owner has given the factory to his workers and the journalist asks: "the hypothesis would be this, a bourgeois in any way acts wrongly.... if the bourgeoisie ends up identifying all humanity with the bourgeois, it no longer has a class struggle to win ahead of it, it has new questions ahead of it". The film precisely shows this hypothesis and confirms Pasolini's theorem (let us remember how for him, cinema was something with a strong social and political value) on the constant and perpetual loss of the bourgeoisie, on the loss of self in modern man.

It then moves to the description of a high bourgeois Milanese family group with the father of the family (Massimo Girotti) leaving his small factory, the son Pietro leaving the Parini high school, the girl Odetta, "a virgin schoolgirl" leaving school holding a photo of her father in her notebook, and the wife (Silvana Mangano), a chaste and pious woman who spends her days reading in the large family villa.

This peaceful family picture is disrupted by the arrival of an enigmatic, silent, and fascinating Guest who spends the days reading the works of Rimbaud.

This young man ends up seducing all the household members one by one, starting with the servant (splendidly interpreted by Laura Betti), who tries to commit suicide with the gas pipe to resist the temptation. The Guest saves her and joins her. So then with the son, the mother, the daughter, and the father. These unions, however, have a flavor of something tender: it is the family members who are attracted to the young man and who ask him to possess them, the Guest's attitude is not malicious, seductive but a paternal one, who caresses the relatives and Pasolini adds: "he is the messenger of God, of Jehovah, who takes mortals away from their false security, who destroys their good conscience, acquired at low cost, under the protection of which the good-thinking, the bourgeois live or rather vegetate, in a false idea of themselves". The relationship between authenticity and inauthenticity is impossible on the plane of linguistic communication: in fact, the young guest does not speak to the other characters, does not try to convince them with words, but has a love relationship with all of them.

One fine day a letter arrives, brought by the usual messenger (Ninetto Davoli), announcing the Guest's departure to everyone. All the characters are shocked and transformed by this experience, tearing off the mask that covered nothingness, the void, the false security of these characters: coming into contact with the most sacred part of themselves, with love, with the authentic part of the human leaves these characters in deep crisis.

The daughter Odetta locks herself in a hysterical paralysis that isolates her from reality, ending her days in a sanatorium. The wife engages in promiscuous relations with young men who seem to have looks similar to the Guest, while the son turns to art trying to reproduce, to represent something that is no longer present, ending up pissing on his abstract canvases and concluding that "the artist is worth nothing, he is an inferior being who writhes and crawls to survive" (I believe that with this Pasolini wanted to attack a certain type of culture that did not propose ethical and political goals).

The only one who manages to grasp the sacred sense of this visitation is the maid, who leaves the villa and returns to her native village, sacrificing her whole self to the hope of the Guest's return until death, transforming into sacred water, which saves, which heals. Here Pasolini helps us again: "the peasant society (represented in the film by the servant), possessed in its own right the sense of the sacred. Subsequently, this sense of the sacred was linked to ecclesiastical institutions, and sometimes degenerated into ferocity, especially when alienated from power. In any case, the sense of the sacred was rooted in the heart of human life.

The father instead tries to follow the message, the revealed truth, and gives the factory to his employees and strips himself of all infrastructures, ending up in the desert to cry out (it seems like Munch's The Scream) the despair of modern man who, stripped of his superficial things acquired with power and well-being, sees his nothingness, his inconsistency.

I don't want to give too many explanations to the film, but I believe that the great Pasolini intended to show how today's men, now crushed in their habits, with masks of security lowered on their faces, if they came into contact with something sacred, religious in the absolute sense (and with this term, I think Pasolini means perhaps the most authentic part of the human being... love, the Id, or I don't know...) would not know how to grasp this knowledge, inevitably entering into crisis, unlike past societies.

The film is a masterpiece because I find it full of poetry both in the splendid images (the scene of the peasant woman at sunset recalls Millet's paintings) and in the music (the splendid Requiem by Mozart) as well as in the simplicity of also telling through the images of one of the greatest Italian poets. The actors' performances are perfect.