Teorema

Teorema

One of the iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini's most radical provocations, Teorema finds the auteur moving beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown and notoriety with a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger - perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil - who, one by one, seduces both the male and female members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly in a procession of sacred and profane images, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle - blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy - is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion and art - as well as a primal scream into the void.