TEOREMA (1968)
Directed & Written by: Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Produced by: Mauro Bolognini & Franco Rossellini.
Director of Photography: Giuseppe Ruzzolini.
Edited by: Nino Baragli.
Music by: Ennio Morricone.
Released by: Koch Lorber.
Language: Italian with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: Italy. 98 min. Not Rated.
With: Silvana Mangano, Terence Stamp, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky, Laura Betti & Andres Soublette.
DVD Features: 2005 documentary Pasolini and Death: A Purely Intellectual Thriller (53 min.)

An attractive young man (Terence Stamp) arrives at the home of an upper-class family. No sooner has he been seduced by the family servant, the son, the mother, the daughter and the husband, than he departs, leaving his lovers radically changed and the audience, which never knows the reason for his visit, confounded. Pasolini himself responded to questions about the young man - is he God or the devil? - saying, "The important thing is that he is sacred." The director was also forthcoming about the transformations Teorema's characters undergo: "The characters live the experience [of seducing the young man] 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... 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."

If Teorema sounds complicated, it is. Its DVD release is, nevertheless, a must for Pasolini fans. On this clear, wide-screen transfer, one can appreciate how Pasolini places his characters on different ends of a wide lawn or a large bed to emphasize their estrangement from one another, and how he uses muted colors to underscore their drab existence. But fans would be well advised to skip the DVD extra - an interview with Guiseppe Zigaina. Zigaina often wrote for Pasolini, but he didn't write Teorema. Zigaina knew Pasolini for many years, but his anecdotes often go nowhere, and he speaks in maddening abstractions that could apply to any artist. For instance: "I started [to write] the moment in which Pasolini revealed to me the function of death. Because the function of death is everything. If you omit death from Pasolini's history, it would be like taking Pasolini and discarding him." Huh? Perhaps future extras on future rereleases will offer a simpler, or at least a clearer, afterword to a notoriously complicated movie. Steven Cordova, contributing editor and poet (Slow Dissolve, Momotombo Press)
October 17,2005