Teorema

If you asked an uncouth hillbilly to imagine European art cinema, he might conjour something like Teorema (1968). Pier Paolo Pasolini hits every conceivable stereotype, from stilted symbolism to elliptical aimlessness. It's simultaneously fascinating and insufferable.

The Visitor (Terence Stamp) visits a middle-class Italian family. He systematically seduces the entire household: maid Emilia (Laura Betti), businessman Paolo (Massimo Girotti), repressed wife Lucia (Silvia Mangano), the artistic son (Ninetto Davoli) and daughter (Anne Wiazemsky). Each family member finds their desires and talents stimulated by The Visitor. Yet he leaves as mysteriously as he came, leaving his charges to ponder existence without him.

Teorema seems Pasolini's bid to outdo Michaelangelo Antonioni as Italy's most pretentious director. He presents seemingly random shots and scenes without benefit of plot or characterization. The Visitor need do no more than read a book to seduce a character. One character winds up wandering nude in the desert; another's buried alive. For further meaning, Pasolini shoots early scenes in silent black-and-white, inter-cuts desert photography with Italian cityscape and drapes them in Biblical quotes and Mozart's Requiem. Clearly Pasolini wants to make a deep statement.

Yet his preoccupations seem easy enough to decode. Teorema equates sexual liberation with religious rapture. Terence Stamp's handsome Visitor becomes a carnal Jesus, seducing the entire family and making them better for the experience. Lucia becomes sexually adventurous; Paolo embarks on a spiritual awakening; Angelino finds artistic inspiration pissing on carpets. Best of all, Emilia becomes a holy woman who heals lepers and levitates! Some characters meet tragic ends, yet the message is clear: bourgeois society stifles not only sexual but spiritual realization.

Is Teorema really so simple? Any film student could craft a convincing defense based on thematic content alone. But Italian cinema is unsubtle on its best days, preferring style to narrative, broad themes to deep characterization. Unlike, say, Luchino Visconti or Sergio Leone, Pasolini's style only interests up to a point. We're expected to read deep meaning into every bizarre image and unmotivated action - perfect for Intro to Film Analysis midterms, but not conducive to audience enjoyment. How seriously, really, can you take an aroused maid jamming a hose down her throat while her paramour watches?

For all that, Teorema is strangely watchable. It may well require multiple viewings to digest. After all, Picnic at Hanging Rock went from head-scratcher to personal favorite through rewatches. But Peter Weir's film has obvious appeal: beautiful photography, hypnotic music, ethereal atmosphere and a palpable sense of dread. If Teorema has a purpose beyond its baroque "themes," it's eluded me.

The Witches (1967)

Producer Dino De Laurentiis assembled five of Italy's greatest directors for this anthology. A showcase for Silvana Mangano (or Mrs. De Laurentis), The Witches (1967) is more notable for its talent than the uneven content. Besides auteurs Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Vittorio De Sica, there's also an oddly-cast Clint Eastwood.

The Witches consists of five short films featuring Mangano. Luchino Visconti's The Witch Burned Alive shows Mangano as Gloria, an actress taking refuge at a mountain resort. Besieged by papparazzi, inflaming the men to passion and the women to jealousy, Gloria's exile drives her to despair. Mauro Bolognini's Civic Responsibility depicts a selfish woman driving an injured man (Alfredo Rosi) to a hospital. The Earth as Seen from the Moon is a fairy tale by Pier Paolo Pasolini, with widower Ciancicato (Toto) and son Baciu (Ninetto Davoli) pursuing their ideal woman - the deaf-mute Absurda Yelp. The Sicilian shows an unfaithful Sicilian wife triggering a blood feud. Finally there's An Evening Like the Others, where housewife Giovanna fantasizes about cheating on her milquetoast husband Carlo (Clint Eastwood).

The Witches advances from a singularly macho conceit: women (specifically Mangano) always cause trouble. The Witch Burned Alive explores this at greatest length: the hotel women relish in stripping Gloria's makeup and wig; a jealous rival (Annie Garadot) seduces a young waiter (Helmut Berger) to prove her womanhood. But the selfishness of Civic Responsibility and The Sicilian's protagonists registers, along with Giovanna's shrewishness. The ideal woman, of course, is Absurda, unable to communicate or hear anything. Baggage aside, how do the stories stack up?


Visconti's story is long, stiff and ponderous without appropriate payoff. Auteurists may recall Bellisima's excoriation of stardom, while Gloria's catatonic exit presages Ingrid Thulin's final scenes in The Damned. But the material's just to thin to match Visconti's pretensions. Bolognini's and Rossi's shorter entries just sort of sit there. Civic Responsibility is an unfunny gag stretched out interminably; The Sicilian resorts to crude jokes about shotgun murders and shrieking widows. Somewhere the filmmakers forgot to add humor.

Nonetheless, Witches gets two lovely chapters. The Earth as Seen From the Moon is a mini-masterpeice. Stars Toto and Ninetto Davoli previously collaborated on Pasolini's The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966), a similarly broad comedy. With absurd hairstyles, exaggerated gestures, fast motion and goofy sight gags (flirting with a mannequin!), they effectively update comedia dell'arte for the '60s. Mangano matches them with an hysterical pantomime performance, down to a delightfully absurd demise. It's strange yet endearingly whimsical, without the off-putting tawdriness of Pasolini's later work.

De Sica's An Evening Like the Others plays like Brief Encounter re-imagined by Fellini. De Sica contrasts Giovanna's dour marriage with her absurd fantasies of sex and violence. She alternately flirts with superheroes Diabolik and Batman, shoots Carlo while wearing a Barbarella costume, or stripteases in a stadium of drooling admirers. Eastwood sends up his image, sporting Man With No Name garb and asking Giovanna if she wants to see A Fistful of Dollars! Mangano comes off best here, eschewing vanity to play an unattractive, unappealing woman.

The Witches is an odd patchwork film, alternately brilliant and lousy. (I haven't even mentioned the Terry Gilliam-style credits animation.) If nothing else, it's an eclectic monument to Dino De Laurentiis's hubris: five of Italy's most talented filmmakers, collaborating on a silly vanity project/sketch comedy. The mind would boggle if this weren't the man who later gave us Orca.