Theorem [1968] [DVD]

A guest arrives at a bourgeois household and, in turn, seduces everyone: father, mother, daughter, son and maid. (Actually he doesn't seduce anyone but responds in a non-judgemental way to other people's desires - as Terence Stamp points out in the accompanying interview).
"Theorem" is one of the true classics of 1960s European art/auteur cinema. I imagine most people interested in this film already know it well. I'd just like to say that this is a fine new DVD edition from the BFI - good sharp print, nice booklet with review from 1968 & a new informative essay and the disc has an entertaining newly filmed interview with Mr Stamp, who worships Fellini & has a grudge against Pasolini almost as big as his grudge against Antonioni, but is perceptive about his character/role. And the fact is that Pasolini enabled Stamp to give his greatest performance.
As the interviews & essays discuss, the basic Marx-meets-Freud "theorem" that the bourgeois patriarchal family is upheld by sexual repression is pure 1968, but the film has proved timeless because of its unique mysterious & poetic quality. Also obvious, in retrospect, is that much of the film is really a representation of Pasolini's anxieties over his own homosexuality - mostly displaced onto poor Silvana Magnano, the housewife! Anyway, this is one 60s classic that actually improves with age - much imitated but never bettered - & well worth getting on this DVD edition.

Theorem is an amazing visual experience, and seeing it on the big screen - or on a high quality screen at home, no doubt - brings out just how avant-garde it still seems. The main thing about it for me is its extraordinary tone, both serious and comical, often at the same time. It is highly original in this respect, constantly surprising the viewer with its breathtaking sense of the human face and how to use the camera, when to cut away and how to get the specificity of place and incident. It opens a bit like a Godard film, with a satirical interview of factory employees whose boss has just handed over the factory to their ownership, in which the interviewer answers his own questions, in effect. We then see the events that lead up to this extraordinary action. At this point it becomes something else - always about cinema and its power, but shot through a gay lens that places it quite far from Godard. The Terence Stamp character is a kind of Christ figure but without the prohibition on sexuality that Christianity usually entails. Here it is quite the opposite: he releases the desires of all the members of the family, plus the maid. His openness towards their desires is so in conflict with their assumed identities that they all go to pieces, although the exact tone of all this is highly ambiguous. There are so many sequences you remember from this film: Silvana Mangano in the summer house staring lasciviously at his discarded clothes, with her perfect make-up; the son urinating on his art, the maid becoming a saint, the speeches everyone makes before the stranger's departure, both slightly absurd and moving, Ninetto Davoli flapping into the forecourt with the mail like a human pelican ... Then there is the repeated landscape of taupe-coloured dust which blows into the air in wisps, and Mozart's profound Requiem, performed in a slow-paced version, set against some jazz by Ennio Morricone. Not forgetting a period pop song coming out of a sixties portable SP record player on the floor of the bedroom Stamp shares with the son - or so it seems, although actually it is just on the soundtrack as they get into bed and lie there in the dark, the son overwhelmed with temptation ... an inspired juxtaposition! It is a unique film, with the house element being a bit like Ozon, but working on a bigger canvas - in fact, it doesn't get any bigger than this.

I got this DVD out of curiosity - not realising that Terence Stamp had done a film with Pasolini. Theorem is somewhat similar to Pasolini's other ad lib social comment stuff from the 60s. Not at all like Gospel of St Matthew, the Decameron or Medea where the subject matter is historical.
For me the gem of this DVD was the bonus 30 minute interview with Terence Stamp at the BFI/NFT in about 2005.