Teorema

"Whatever the middle-class does is wrong, right?" A parable, cool and ecstatic, "una vera invasione." The pretty visitor (Terence Stamp) in the Milanese mansion, announced by a jolly messenger (Ninetto Davoli) who flaps his arms to pop music. The maid (Laura Betti) inhales kitchen gas before lifting her skirt, though everybody gets a turn with the stranger's gleaming crotch. The youngsters (Anne Wiazemsky, Andrés José Cruz Soublette) are in carnal thrall, so is Mom (Silvana Mangano), who offers herself bare on the veranda. Dad (Massimo Girotti) compares him to Tolstoy's Gerasim, soon the ailing tycoon is back on his feet. And then, just like that, the alien departs, leaving the family to grapple with the realization of the void. "By leaving, you're not destroying anything that was there before, except my chaste bourgeois reputation. Who cares about that?" Pier Paolo Pasolini at his most abstruse and pointed, pure and concentrated. Factories and empty churches dot the landscape, along with Rimbaud verses and Francis Bacon pics, Mozart weeps for them all. Divine or demonic, who can tell? (Stamp's casting in Billy Budd is indicated.) Sometimes destruction is the cure, thus the daughter spinning with the camera until she's a catatonic Klimt with nothing in her clenched hand. The son is inspired by being "out of the natural order of things," diving into messy painting like Duchamp reincarnated. (Faced with a blue canvas, he adds an organic yellow.) Accepting no substitutes, the lady of the house goes cruising while the maid becomes a saint, up in the air and down in the dirt. "New, unrecognizable techniques," the Pasolini way, the artist "come un matto." Back to the desert... The joke is that it's My Man Godfrey, into Brooks' Real Life it goes. Cinematography by Giuseppe Ruzzolini.