Theorem (Pasolini, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.30 & 8.45pm
This film, part of the Pier Paolo Pasolini season, is on an extended run from April 12th to May 9th. More details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Apart from his final feature, Salo, this is probably Pier Paolo
Pasolini's most controversial film, and to my mind one of his very best,
though it has the sort of audacity and extremeness that send some
American audiences into gales of derisive, self-protective laughter
(1968). The title is Italian for “theorem,” in this case a mythological
figure: an attractive young man (Terence Stamp) who visits the home of a
Milanese industrialist and proceeds to seduce every member of the
household—father, mother (Silvana Mangano), daughter (Anne Wiazemsky),
son, and maid (Laura Betti). Then he leaves, and everyone in the
household undergoes cataclysmic changes. Pasolini wrote a parallel novel
of the same title, part of it in verse, while making this film; neither
work is, strictly speaking, an adaptation of the other, but each deals
with the same elements, and the stark poetry of both is like a
triple-distilled version of Pasolini's view of the world—a view in which
Marxism, Christianity, and homosexuality are forced into mutual and
scandalous confrontations. It's an “impossible” work: tragic, lyrical,
outrageous, indigestible, deeply felt, and wholly sincere.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here is the BFI trailer.
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