Teorema

A mysterious and attractive young man, heralded with skips and dances by a cheerful postman, “visits” a bourgeois family in a city in Lombardy. The family “visited” is the kind usually called a “normal” family, meaning by normality the view of life typical of the middle class. The young man’s visit disrupts this “normality,” or rather it reveals its fictitious nature. Filled with compassion and frivolity, he makes love to every member of the family: the maid, the son, the daughter, the mother and the father. In doing so he satisfies the hitherto ignored thirst for love on the part of all five. But then back comes the capering and skipping postman. A telegram takes the young man away.

Alberto Moravia

Teorema tells of a religious experience. It is the story of the arrival of a divine visitor in a bourgeois family. This visitation turns everything that its members knew about themselves upside down; that guest has come to destroy. Authenticity, to use an old-fashioned word, destroys inauthenticity. When he goes away, everyone is left with an awareness of their own inauthenticity. And so each member of this family has a crisis, and the film ends more or less with the following moral: whatever a bourgeois does, it’s wrong.

Incontro con Pier Paolo Pasolini, interview conducted by Lino Peroni, in Inquadrature, nos. 15-16 (fall 1968), 33-37

There were those who wondered, at the time of his novels about the city outskirts and the lumpenproletariat, where their poet would turn with the shift in Italian society toward prosperity [...] and so it was that after visiting the shantytowns of Rome, Pasolini visited the wealthy suburbia of Milan and uncovered its intimate despair, its soft and spectral light.

Attilio Bertolucci

PRODUCTION: Aetos Film

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