Metaphoric Sex, Symbolic Circus

...Yet since there is almost no talk, and what there is comes mostly after the visitation, it would seem that, if cage there be, it is the Stranger who plunges us into it...

...It might even explain the sadomasochist overtones: the daughter, in her catatonic state, digging her fingernails deep into her palms (felicitous suggestion of the Crucifixion as well...

...Lulu, as a snake that can embrace a tiger to death...

...The life story of the notorious dancer-courtesan is told in terms of an extended circus metaphor: A ringmaster is putting on a spectacular circus show, whose tableaus are jumping-off points for flashbacks...

...The ritual of the Catholic Church, with its quasi-transvestite garb, its florid panoply, its celibacy, its choirboys, has always appealed to homosexuals...

...What of the visual elements...

...But then a cage of 923 words spread over an hour and a half has bars far enough apart for an elephant to walk through...

...The son turns into a fanatic abstract painter who will cover a canvas, a la Yves Klein, with solid blue paint, and then urinate on it-abstract peeing, no doubt...

...But quotable ironies like "I thank Pasolini and Heaven for it," by helping its adverusers, lend support to Teorema...

...The tough ringmaster is, finally, as mushy as the rest, and we are to believe that Lola loved her mad King Ludwig tenderly...

...Why don't they all become pizza vendors, or clowns in a traveling circus, or a rock group called God's Very Own or The Grateful Had...

...Jacques d'Eaubonne's designs for the film are always effective, and Christian Matras' color photography is good for that by now much-surpassed period...

...In 1963, Andrew Sarris called it "the greatest film of all time," and went on to announce his willingness to stake his "critical reputation...

...The film's albatross is Marline Carol: a dumpy, putty-faced Lola with just about no acting ability, whom even the clever costumes of Marcel Escoffier cannot make sexier than one of his bustier dummies...

...Stamp's appearance suggests, if anything, a Caravaggio angel...

...unfortunately, however, without saying something...

...It may even be that Teorema is a conscious or unconscious homosexual pun: "Divine" is a favorite epithet among inverts, and the hero-heroine of Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers is called Divine...

...the Divine, extricates us...

...on this one proposition...

...Lola Monies is as lavish as only beggarly intellects could conceive it...

...A phrase likening the film, no matter how slyly, to "a piece of geometry that the Deity Himself might have thought it wise to spend six days on," can nicely befuddle the less than ideal reader —aside from putting dangerous ideas into the deity's head...

...The problem with much—though not all—of this art is that the inversion colors the conversion, that God plus sodomy yields a perversion we might call godomy...

...I thought of asking him a biological question: When five members of a typical Milanese middle-class household are metaphorically screwed by a hypothesis, what is the issue...

...Rimbaud, Bacon—we see what kind of sexuality the divinity likes in an artist...

...Mother-naked, father faces the camera and emits the howl mother emitted before him...

...Apart from a few brief exteriors, mostly close shots of the actors doing vague, indefinable things...

...The combination of intense lack of talent and looks with scenes of hermetic emptiness represents a new high in minimal art, cinematic division...

...But since she is always, even in bed, wearing thick, chalk-white, heavily rouged and mascaraed pancake make-up, rather like a kabuki mask, she might as well be enacted by Utaimon XIII, or whatever numeral the current star female impersonator of the Kabuki Theater bears...

...It is based on a fictionalized biography by Cecil St.-Laurent, a Prix-Unique novelist if ever there was one...

...Why should the mother become a whore and the servant a saint...

...Collaborating on the script with Ophiils were Annette Wademant and Jacques Natanson, competent enough hacks...

...Wallace Fowlie has written about Rimbaud's "angel-ism," and idealized catamite angels appear in works as diverse as those of Cocteau and Allen Ginsberg...

...the mother being brutally used in a ditch...

...An only slightly less deplorable exhibition is the fuss being made over Lola Monies, the last film of the late Max Ophuls, made in 1955 but only now shown commercially in a more or less uncut version...

...Then a telegram summons him away...

...But the episodes that weave in and out of the circus setting to chronicle the picaresque odyssey of the pseudo-Spanish dancer-adventuress are both superficial and old hat...

...It further explains his pretty, tight-trousered looks, and why the mother picks up young boys rather than mature men...

...The rest of the time he is mounting the rest of the cast, sometimes without the removal of clothes...

...Nor are you to think that there is anything like meaningful dialogue in Teorema...

...But the answer is obvious: What is begotten is Teorema...

...At a Museum-of-Modern-Art screening of Teorema, Pasolini explained to the audience that the Stranger is "a hypothesis," the sex "metaphorical," and the family a typical Milanese, or European, middle-class family...

...in America, conversely, it is the reviewers for the mass media that have been most rhapsodic about it...

...In the introductory remarks to The Threepenny Opera, we are told that it is meant to be as lavish as only beggars could conceive it...

...Perhaps the best such scene is the first, showing the end of the Lola-Lisz: affair, although Will Quad-flieg, a decent actor, lacks Lisztian dash...

...she painted her face heavily enough...

...the servant eating boiled nettles and having herself entombed...

...There is no latticed bedstead, no gauzy curtain, no trapeze artist's net through which the camera does not shoot, no porthole or carriage window through which it does not peep...

...This may account also for the weirdness of the two younger actresses...

...It used to be a favorite subject of scholastic disputation whether God, being omnipotent as well as immortal, could destroy himself...

...Pretty soon the whole household is in a dither...

...the father, too, is rich, and he gives away his earthly goods to become an eremite...

...The film is now being prosecuted in Italy, possibly at the instigation of the Vatican, and Pasolini might have to go to prison...

...Why not the reverse...

...In no time—in bed, on a sun deck, in the bushes—he has done as much for the industrialist, his wife, their son and daughter...

...The father gives away his factory to the workers, goes to the railway station and almost follows a trick into the men's room...

...And why do the five react as they do...

...When King Ludwig requests a needle and thread so that Lola, who cut open her bodice for him, can depart decently, the order is passed on from chamberlain to chamberlain, lackey to lackey, laterally across corridors and reception rooms, vertically down tiered galleries and staircases—a film cliche as old as the hills, or at least as the snow-capped peak in the Paramount trademark...

...As the Stranger, Terence Stamp is generally sitting around nursing a Mona Lisa smile and reading Rimbaud in a Franco-Italian edition...

...Mother, we are told, is played by Silvana Mangano...

...This would account for the sessualita metaforica, as Pasolini labeled the sex in Teorema...

...What of the direction provided by this "Pantheon director...

...Why our liberation from words should be accomplished by a divinity reading words, and why that divinity, even granting its being Italian, should not be up on its French, is left unexplained...

...The color cinematography is handsome to look at, but what is it looking at...

...cracking his whip, he describes Lola as the most dangerous wild beast of all, and, at the end of the film, exhibits her in a cage...

...Social class can't be the answer...

...The film gives us the ultimate baroque overelaboration of the circus, being to that genre what Busby Berkeley's choreographed Grand Central Stations were to the Broadway show numbers they supposedly represented...

...Pasolini has declared that the film is largely about the "cage of words" in which we are all cooped up, from which the Stranger, who represents (you have guessed it...

...There are, in fact, a great many male crotch shots in the film, almost as if it were told from the point of view of a homosexual worm...

...Yet occasional scenarists' raisins and directorial sugar-coating notwithstanding, Lola Monies sinks under the combined ballast of banality, sentimentality, and pointless-ness...

...Oskar Werner's performance is distinguished only by the rosebud mouth the make-up department bestowed on him...

...The maid goes back to her parental farm where she cures a boy of eczema, has her hair turn miraculously to silver, eats only a soup made of boiled nettles, levitates above the barn roof, and ends up by having a friend bury her in a building site, leaving only the eyes exposed, with a puddle of tears forming slightly to the left of them...

...The advertisements proudly proclaim that though there are only 923 words in the film (it is not clear whether that includes duplicates), it says everything...

...It features, besides enough doily shots to put the gyrations of the Dolly Sisters to shame, the very devices for which nonauteurs like Bourgui-gnon have been damned by the pundits...

...A mysterious, handsome Stranger appears, no one knows whence, at a party given by a wealthy Milanese industrialist...

...In the main masculine roles, Peter Ustinov fails to give the ringmaster meaningful definition, and Anton Wal-brook makes the King of Bavaria avuncular rather than eccentric...

...In between, she looks straight into the camera and emits a fearful howl...

...Though the title, quite plainly, is the Italian for "theorem...

...In the New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt wrote a rave review intended, she tells me, as a put-on...

...instead, he throws off his clothes then and there and hurries off to a wilderness, glimpses of which have appeared, like a refrain, throughout the film to the accompaniment of quotations from the Bible...

...Awful...

...When, at the film's finale, rough New Orleans menfolk are allowed to kiss Lola's fabled hands for a dollar, they are overpaying nearly as much as the customers of the Beekman Theater, who are spending three times that amount on Max Ophiils' elegantly scented garbage...

...At the slightest sign of a little consecutive action, Pasolini whisks us off to some unrelated nonincident, or to that wilderness with cloud shadows scurrying across it and another unrelated biblical quotation streaking across the soundtrack...

...Baby Love: An audience that had come to see so ribald a work was in his opinion obviously unequipped for Pasolini's profundities...

...And he pointed out that whereas the men don't come to such bad ends, the women get the works...

...In Europe, it became highly controversial, receiving last year in Venice the Prize of the International Catholic Film Office, only to have that Office revoke the prize this year...

...Teorema is totally vapid as film, yet might it not be valid as a parable...

...The cultist cinema magazines of Europe have proclaimed Teorema a masterpiece...

...This idea, the best in the film, is a steal from Frank Wedekind's Earth Spirit, in whose prologue a similarly bedizened and whip-wielding animal trainer steps before the curtain and introduces the heroine...

...Godard, possessed of the face of a horse, the teeth of a rabbit, and the expression of an amoeba...

...But Georges Auric has cleverly woven Liszt's "Valse d'adieu" into his score, and the scenarists have evoked the parting of jaded sophisticates with reasonable cleverness...

...Frankly, I can't see how this God (Pasolini has also said—what hasn't he said?—that the Stranger is not Christ, but "the terrible God of Creation") reaches those five people: Though the mystics have put erotic tropes to good use, I cannot take this by-the-numbers intercourse seriously even as a metaphor...

...It's a metaphoric sexuality all right, but what the metaphor stands for is not all that divine...

...people keep referring to the film as "Theo-rama," either because they think it is named after the process in which it is shot (like Cinerama, only more divine), or perhaps because they assume the title to be an obscure Greek word meaning "rammed by God...

...Truly, God works in mysterious ways...

...Vincent Canby of the Times, while he clearly disliked the movie, was humbly respectful, advocating that it "should be seen at least twice" for full understanding, and blaming the healthy laughter with which it was greeted by a preview audience not on anything like the film's absurdity, but on the regular feature at that theater...

...he said, "but, you know, the second and third ingredients are not to be taken seriously...

...and the sadomasochism that frequently accompanies inversion has found rich pabulum in Saint Sebastian and other holy martyrs...

...and tend to be rushed to the point of ludicrousness...

...We were not told whether he was simultaneously dropping down his critical reputation a notch or two...

...The daughter is played by Anne Wiazemski, in private life Mme...

...There is no doubt that it says everything...

...In discussing the film with one of Italy's immortals, the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, I asked what he thought of this mixture of fag-gotry, Marxism, and Christianity...

...Most interesting, however, is the reception Teorema has been getting...

...Why should the buggered son become an action painter ipso facto, and the humped daughter a catatonic...

...The mother becomes nymphomaniacal, cruising about in her sports car and picking up youths, singly or in pairs, to have intercourse with-either back at their pads, or in a ditch beside a church...

...Why shouldn't the mother become a painter...

...The Stranger and the son look through a book of reproductions of the paintings of Francis Bacon...

...The daughter vacuously holds out her photograph album to the Stranger and says nothing, perhaps by way of preparation for catatonia...

...What is the meaning of their reactions...

...The angel as sexually ambiguous-asexual, bisexual, androgynous?has fascinated pederastic painters and writers...

...The homosexual milieu tends to be more promiscuous than the heterosexual (something that heterosexuals often envy), and the easygoing, geometrical way in which this Stranger covers everyone has distinctly homosexual overtones...

...Behavior here is a series of poses...

...The film actually begins with a quite unger-mane bit of staged cinema-verite in which workers are sounded out on their feelings about the factory being turned over to them, so that the film proper is a long flashback leading up to this Marxist miracle in Milan...

...The daughter becomes catatonic and must be carted away by men in white...

...But do not for a moment assume that the story proceeds by any sort of narrative logic...

...By 1969, though he still raved about the movie (a great favorite also of Susan Sontag's, and of all auleur theorists here and abroad), he added that "reservations about the . . . coldness of decor now make me drop it down a notch or two from the very summit of greatness...

...The elderly maid is about to commit suicide from sheer frustrated desire, but the Stranger obligingly hops into bed with her...

...As I see it, now and in 1963, Lola Monies is a masterpiece for chambermaids, especially of the ante-bellum, Aus-tro-Hungarian sort, and for all those who share that worthy profession's legacy of dime-store romanticism...

...The end...

...It jumps around in fragmented Godardian non se-quiturs that arise from nowhere and trail off into nothing...

...That question, at least, has been answered: by making a film like Teorema-easily...