Pier Paolo Pasolini
Teorema

Impeccable neorealist, faultless and indispensable, authentic photographer of the coerced misery of the post-war period, crude and brazen reporter-novelist, forger of monumental cinematic history and initiator of that Decamerot-like genre that thrived in the Seventies - with the inevitable inflation of narrative meaning and customs, Pasolini has embedded an extraordinary and unique literary-cinematic pair within his vast productive curriculum. The object, or rather the objects in question, are named Teorema, divided excellently into its novel variant and film variant.

Teorema is probably the most ambitious project of his life, even more daring than the Decamerot-like Trilogy of Life and the gloomy descent into darkness of Salò, mainly for its rich psycho-analytical background rather than for the plot and the eventual (and indeed existent) controversial, scandalous, and scabrous particularities. Pasolini had never delved (nor would he ever delve) into the complex world of socio-psychological analysis from the point of view of paranoia, existentialism, and spirituality multiplied to the utmost degree, and this mix of sacred, profane, psychological, psychic, surreal, and social unfortunately did not find a corresponding follow-up in the artistic-productive epic of the artist. Just to cite undisputed masterpieces like the Decameron or The Flower of the One Thousand and One Nights, Pasolini does not manage in his final films to elevate in equal analogy the mixture of empiricism/concreteness/carnality and spirituality/morality/asceticism/ethic, allowing these components to clash voluntarily with each other.

Teorema might, on the contrary, ascend to a perfect sum, a completed circle of all the philosophical, social, spiritual, material, and poetic journey undertaken by Pasolini, passing through politics, the conception of radical evil, criticism of his contemporaneity, and the rejected system established there. Before analyzing the film, it may be wise to focus on the eponymous volume, an authentic product of avant-garde and non-conformist literature: in a cauldron where prose, poetry, and veiled theatricality unite in a "deviated" novel, the plot resembles a screenplay, with a bourgeois family from Milan with a typical industrial father, chaste mother and hearth-angel, two children educated in the best Milanese institutions and the faithful servant; this idyllic picture starts to crumble with the arrival of a mysterious guest, lacking identity, who gradually seriously questions the rigid and hypocritical bourgeois tranquility of the social nucleus, whose members - apparently conforming to the doctrine of their status - mature within themselves resentments, disorders, conflicts, impulses, appetites, malandrinely suppressed and concealed passions. After a period of time when the true nature of the characters is revealed, the guest leaves. The shock is such that it shatters not only the ethical, moral, and emotional balances of the bourgeois family but even psychologically shatters the various members, causing a fake nemesis of what seemed to be their true nature (which in reality was nothing but a squalid ensemble of caricature formalities): the younger daughter falls into schizophrenia, the older son - a repressed homosexual - becomes a restless, disturbed, and unbalanced painter, the virginal mother instinctively unleashes her sexual instincts by giving herself to the frivolous and libertine youth of the metropolis, the servant flees to the countryside and metamorphoses into a "wise woman" while the head of the family denudes himself at the Central Station finally losing himself in the desert.

The film adaptation of Teorema reflects in every minute detail the content of the novel and indeed represents its artistic-visual coronation par excellence, also due to a first-rate cast of actors, including the splendid and divine Silvana Mangano. With the usual style halfway between the dirty and the enigmatic, between the rawness of perceptive matter and the spiritual of the intangible, Pasolini transforms the most ambitious literary project of his career into a special archive masterpiece: characters are well distinguished, the emotional sine wave in continuous and proper evolution, the setting adequate, the expressions flawless and the aura of mystery and darkness maintained and mostly enhanced. The film, indeed, excellently accomplishes the transmutation of the poetry-prose-theatricality triptych of the novel into the unitary visual art of the film: dialogues, acts, and moods of the characters, conjugated in the volume according to different styles - not just rhetorical, find their best fulfillment in the dynamism and mutability of the protagonists. Among these, the guest and the servant, more than others, are imbued with "divinity" (the former is to be identified as a sort of punishing God of the bourgeoisie, a Demiurge of a new social parable contrary to the hypocrisy and fake morality of the middle class, the latter, despite her own social mediocrity, is able to elevate herself - even "levitating" in the sky - as a transcendental representative of the less fortunate classes), providing the feature film with an unfounded creative value, skillfully transferring into scenes, even "acts," the literary multitude of the text.

Undisputed masterpieces in their respective genres, Teorema writes a wide page of complex literature that manages to evolve - quickly and painlessly - into the best of cinematic hypotheses, the result of a filmmaker-writer-etcetera compromise that only a mind like Pasolini's could achieve and consolidate.