“Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most erotically Catholic film. God visits a bourgeois Italian family in the form of Terence Stamp, who never looked better before or after this role. Incidentally, Stamp’s portrayal of God featured the first glimpse of frontal male nudity shown in international cinema and caused quite a storm. After seducing the entire family – businessman father, glamorous mother, frumpy daughter, nervous son (in baggy jockey shorts) and pious female servant – God vanishes and the whole family goes nuts. Father gives away his factory and strips naked in public, Mother picks up and seduces rough trade in her automobile. But the best is the finale, where the spookily religious servant levitates and then holy water gushes from her grave.”
Released in Italian cinemas on this day (7 September 1968): visionary director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s stark, jarring and inscrutable masterpiece Teorema (also known as Theorem). Teorema first blew my mind way back in my university student days in Canada – and not just because Pasolini keeps his camera rapturously glued to the beauteous Terence Stamp’s crotch and ass! (Stamp died on 17 August. Watching Teorema is a great way to remember him). The central theme of an alluring outsider disrupting and seducing an entire family (and causing each member to subsequently crack up) would inform later films like Baby Love (1969), Something for Everyone (1970) and Saltburn (2023). My favourite performance: the magnificent Silvana Mangano (pictured) as the powdered, bewigged and virtually silent trophy wife Lucia. Emotional torment never looked so chic!
