Teorema

Even I wanted to kill Pasolini by the time it was over.

Visibly metaphorical imagery aside, I'm willing to argue the film's first half is secretly a comedy, what with how the family is obviously shook by Terence Stamp's presence to the point they lose sleep over him. You have to admit that's pretty hilarious.

Pasolini parodied gay coming-of-age art-movies before they were even invented.

f*** this

Apr. 71

Pasolini segue sempre critiche superficiali sulla "borghesia". Questo film è un esempio perfetto..

so funny.

"Teorema" is a secret comedy about how a hunky rebel/god seduces an entire family of capitalists (and their maid) and completely changes all of them. One becomes a painter, one becomes a nymphomaniac, one becomes a saint, one is put away and one embraces communism and runs naked in a Biblical desert. It's visually and thematically striking and confusing as fuck. But a fascinating exploration of sex, rebellion and the divine it also is.

Confounding. A somewhat slight fable satirizing bourgeois vapidity, but with enough theological and artistic undertones to provoke some thought. Pasolini's eye for faces was his strongest visual attribute here.

Exquisitely shot. Pasolini was one who got to the heart of particular issues through a predominantly aesthetic approach. There is a seething mass underneath the surface, an earthy thing, full of worms and corpses to feed the sickly flowers. Probably important for Sato (and Miike too), although Pasolini is less obsessive and one-note.

Part 1 is some guy seducing everyone in a household, including the donkey girl from Balthazar and I swear it was Jeanne Dielman. Part 2 is how their lives all go to pot, except for the maid who can levitate. If you like people staring forlornly, this could be the movie for you!

Aesthetically pleasing but I was pretty underwhelmed. It's interesting at times, but I didn't really get it either on an intellectual or emotional level. It's very watchable, especially given the relatively short run time, but it didn't do much for me.

This is what actually happens when Terence Stamp visits your house.

Feb 26, 2021 Sarıgül

It seems an intensely personal film that defeats comprehension unless one is Pasolini or Pasolini-adjacent. In that sense it acts out our own relation to it.

Beautifully-shot film shows Pasolini's filmmaking skill while also indulging his excesses of caricature and amateur philosophizing. Examining the effect of societal change on the bourgeoisie, Pasolini runs into conundrum of whether a member of the bourgeoisie can effectively criticize the bourgeoisie without sinking into hypocrisy and self-delusion. Pasolini uses professional actors here, but film often plods through its dubbed, flat performances. There's genius here, overcome by foolishness.

The power of the angle in cinema. The power dynamic it creates. Pasolini attempts to merge all his world views and a lot of it works and some of it is confounding but not all art needs to match my own world views.

Pasolini is one of the only good Italian directors

Peaks are very high, but the oddest thing about this -and it is extremely odd- is how tedious most of it is.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the world's biggest fan of Pasolini, but this registered with me in a way that I haven't really experienced from any other of his films. The slow, meditative pace of the film pairs nicely with the Christian surrealism that oozes out from between the frames. Watching a painfully boring bourgeois family lose their minds is a treat, no matter what the presentation happens to be.

The opening scene gears us up for a thoughtful socio-political examination, perhaps on the disparity between the working class and the elite that run their work. Instead, we get a bunch of Bunuelian-style soft surrealism that fails to engage or cohere from scene to scene. The story is such abstract nonsense, Pasolini should've just written a poem instead. I kinda dig some of the scenes towards the end, and the film's ending is suitably anarchic, but this kind of well-shot nonsense is no fun.

(28/06/11): Teorema is formally less 'naturalistic' than usual, with Pasolini adopting a more conventional 'arthouse' style that was somewhat typical in the post-L'avventura film world of the late 60's. Nonetheless, he creates a few memorable scenes, especially involving Stamp as the mysterious seducer turning a wealthy family's life upside down. It's as subtle as a sledgehammer and probably should have been a comedy, but it's an interesting, if obviously dated, bourgeois bash.

Strong stuff from Pasolini as Terence Stamp, the film's divine presence, seduces each member in turn of a bourgeois family, producing strongly unique and individual reactions from each. Potentially infuriating and farcical the strength of the author's voice carries this through to realise the depths of a fundamental message.

modern society is a fragile and incestuous bourgeois clump. the only struggle is the struggle between its two opposite poles, the hetero and the homo, and if even a single thread breaks, the two can only result in mutual destruction. now if that sounds dumb as shit, it's only because this film does not exactly lend itself to interpretation. or to say, it lends itself to over-interpretation. or to say, it sounds pretty terrible, but there's enough oddness here for it to be pleasurable.

With few words -- but such striking images as close-ups on Stamp's dry eroticism --, Pasolini chronicles the impossible: humanity, represented by bourgeois family, whose patriarch is an industry man, simply returning to where it belongs. And this place is DUST. Teorema is such a powerful digression on fate and faith -- of course, because Mozart's Requiem --, that it plays like a family drama shot with a strong sense of madness and despair.

Stamp's irresistible charismatic force causes an entire family to drop the façade of bourgeois repression and embrace, variously, art, sex and the primal scream, but these all just conceal and expose the ultimate horror of contemporary kenosis. An exemplary case of sixties waywardness, this is woefully outdated if it was not indeed already fundamentally wrong at time of release. More fundamentally still, it is tedious and uninteresting, Mozart's Requiem notwithstanding.

its strong personality makes up for its inherent shortcomings

Pasolini has an austere reputation. He was a Marxist, a poet, a homosexual, and a murder victim. He had his moments, like The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and there is a profuse, carnal vitality in films like Arabian Nights. But Theorem is a key work and a crushing example of art-house gravitas. It rises to sublime heights of impossibility when it tries to lure Silvana Mangano into passages of wanton desperation - yet her false eyelashes remain as stiff and hieratic as the wings on a kite.

only worker class represents a new world.

I hate writing this kind of reviews, but it's not like Pasolini has left me a choice. Anyway, the first part of the movie is about sex, with no sex, and no, it's not as sophisticated as it sounds. Seems like Pasolini didn't have the guts to ask his actors to have real sex on the set, or maybe they just didn't allow him to show these scenes, with real sex to the wide public. The second part is a pathetic attempt to create a piece of art with the attribute of "deep trash".

#525

I don't think there is a film I detest more than this one.

The encounter with a different, strange world-view shakes every member of the household. The destruction of their accepted norms or rather the routine of the everyday life, the absence of their own values leaves them in a painful condition. Each suffers in his own way for his own reason/non-reason/emptiness/disbelief/belief. It seems that the belief does not erase the suffering of the believer, but at least it is able to reduce those of others.

Well-crafted in many ways, but somehow both simplistic and annoyingly aloof. Mangano is really good in this but it didn't really work for me.

While there are a lot of things about this movie that I did like ultimately I scored it the way I did because ultimately it left me lacking. I couldn't quite take the leaps that the movie wanted me to with the characters. Still, there were some beautiful shots and I really liked the a lot of the movie played out in silence. I just feel that the second half of the movie just dragged a bit too much for me to really enjoy it.

478

Tout va bien

Overall, I liked it, for a variety of reasons; the surrealism, the beautiful cinematography, the quick pacing. Still, I felt underwhelmed. Pasolini's dry sensibilities, which I loved in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, just didn't work for me here.

Revisto em agosto de 2023

Pasolini pushing buttons again, but this is far better than the sledgehammer of Salo. Much is left up to interpretation, and we're never certain if the stranger is a force of good or evil, but there definitely seems to be some Bunuel-esque skewering of both the upper classes and Catholicism. It's an intriguing piece that's thoughtful and funny (and with a terrific Morricone score)... maybe a little obvious at times, but still engaging. Possibly an influence on Miike's Visitor Q.

Terence Stamp: International lover, dream awakener, soul destroyer. The themes are pretty obvious, a sprinkling of sexuality and socialism and a whole lot of religious allegory. What's being said about these is less clear. My initial thought is that it explores how humanity can function without faith but, once it's introduced, taking it away can have all sorts of consequences. It's not a particularly thorough or captivating exploration, though, leading to a beautiful but seemingly shallow film.

466

Wtf? A bland movie from Pasolini? The one thing that guy could always be counted on was to be abrassive and over the top. And he was damn good at it. Subtlety is NOT one of his strengths and it shows here.

# 641

An amazing tension. Fascinating