Saltburnhas been dividing audiences ever since its release in late-2023, but those who disliked it might find exactly what they wanted in a 1968 Italian movie calledTheorem. Directed by one of the masterminds of provocative cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the movie is centered around the collapse of a wealthy household after a bewildering stranger seduces every member of the family just to disappear as mysteriously as he arrives.
Theoremplays out in the opposite direction toEmerald Fennell’s period drama. There’s an argument to be made thatSaltburngets so close to what it’s satirizing that it ends up becoming exactly what it’s supposedly criticizing. Torn between a shallow bourgeoisie caricature and a portrayal of the lower classes' obsession with an unattainable status, the film left many people disappointed. Hopefully, it’s nothing thatTheoremcan’t fix.
How Theorem Gets the Bourgeois Crisis Right
Theorem’s infamous tagline reads, “There are only 923 words spoken inTeorema— but it says everything!.” This is a sentence that translates into the most honest irony. After all, Pasolini’s film indeed communicates through motions, sculpting its characters through silence and shadows. The film wants viewers to ask themselves what the bourgeois state is exactly, for only after stripping it to the core will one be able to understand what it takes to destroy it.
Therefore, the movie starts by individually exploring each member of a Milanese household, and how each of them reacts to the arrival of a mysterious andnameless male character, simply known as The Visitor (played by Terence Stamp). The son, Pietro (Andrés José Cruz Soublette), lives for the appearances, repressing his vulnerability from his friends. The daughter, Odetta (Anne Wiazemsky), locks herself away, retreating to a timid personality. Lucia, the mother (Silvana Mangano), unhappy and sexually repressed, longs to disrupt the chastity symbols that set her apart from her desires. Finally, Paolo, the father (Massimo Girotti), troubled to the point of illness by the superiority mask he must flawlessly exhibit, is on the brink of a meltdown.
And so comes The Visitor, who gives each and every member of this family exactly what they want without asking anything in return. He attends to their desires and concerns, and listens without saying a word. And then he disappears, carrying with him all the masks that held that family together.
Instead of irreverently poking fun at the bourgeoisie, Pasolini films his characters with a humanist eye, while not necessarily renouncing his contempt for them. He acknowledges their basic needs, and how they repress them by holding on to tradition and lineage. Their shallow way of life evidences a craving for the ecstatic, with a need to keep things unchanged. Before The Visitor comes into the picture, it’s almost as if they’re stuck in limbo; and the sepia cinematography unites forces with an angelic score to illustrate the moments that precede his arrival.
Afilm for Marxists, motion equals crisis for the bourgeoisie inTheorem; when The Visitor leaves, and they must come to terms with the full understanding of themselves, they’re forced to either give up or resort to extremes to find what could make them feel alive again. There’s something as unsettling as moving at the sight of the family’s patriarch stripping off all his material belongings in the end and letting out a monstrous scream. It says “free, at last,” but at the cost of something money can’t buy.
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Pasolini Pioneered Provocative Cinema
Theoremuses religion as a catalyst for tragedy, bringing about one of Pasolini’s most recurring trademarks: the profane versus the sacred. The Visitor breaks the curse that envelops this bourgeois household, and everything about his stay is surrounded by a mystical aura; from the herald that comes out of nowhere to announce his arrival to the nearly supernatural tenderness that envelops each of his moves. Though religion is often regarded as a means to propagate conservative principles and late capitalism, here, Pasolini uses it as a tool to bring its faults to light.
If The Visitor is a revolutionary Christ inTheorem, Oliver (played by Barry Keoghan) is a destructive Antichrist inSaltburn. Fennell’s film drinks from the same fountain as Pasolini’s movie, but never quite achieves its level of subtlety. In her movie, Oliver is a parasite; in Pasolini’s, The Visitor is the medicine that beats the plague. The blatantness ofSaltburncomes to the point of having her secret antagonist wear horns at a costume party and her good guy, Felix (Jacob Elordi), wearing angel wings.
As for the film’s scandalous, though shockingly clean moments, they desperately aim at strings of provocative cinema, which Pasolini pioneered. Even in the face of the profane symbolism ofTheoremand its suggestive mockery towards the upper classes, it’s far from being his most controversial movie.
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Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom, also known as Pasolini’s sickening masterpiece, can be found in pretty much every list of disturbing movies ever made. And though the film traffics in unsettling imagery, the images are merely a pretext for an unscrupulous critique of Italy’s fascist regime — a critique said to have caused his suspicious death. InThe Gospel According to St. Matthew, Pasolini retraces the steps of Jesus with a humanist eye, applying the rawconditions of Italian neorealismto the divine journey of Christ. InArabian Nights, the filmmaker explores the pleasures of the flesh. The list goes on, making up a prolific filmography that knew no boundaries.
Though Pasolini’s movies walk with hands held tight to the provocative and the controversial, they always had something to say. They were fruits of indomitable freedom, determined to pass the liberty of both the mind and the body, to denounce a moment in history controlled by hatred. The titleTheoremperfectly captures Pasolini’s goals: though it hints at a logical interpretation of facts, a chain of reasoning that constitutes a theorem, the movie embraces the illogical and the absurd as the only possible consequence of the death of the system.
Saltburnis available to stream on Prime Video, whileTheoremcan be streamed on The Criterion Channel
