Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3401 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-09-24
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: Italian, English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 92 minutes

Synopsis
The eccentric Italian director's atmospheric tale of a prominent, dysfunctional Milanese family which engineers its own destruction when a spiritually minded stranger moves in on them.

Customer Reviews

Saint Terence
A guest arrives at a bourgeois household and, in turn, seduces everyone: father, mother, daughter, son and maid. (Actually he doesn't seduce anyone but responds in a non-judgemental way to other people's desires - as Terence Stamp points out in the accompanying interview).
"Theorem" is one of the true classics of 1960s European art/auteur cinema. I imagine most people interested in this film already know it well. I'd just like to say that this is a fine new DVD edition from the BFI - good sharp print, nice booklet with review from 1968 & a new informative essay and the disc has an entertaining newly filmed interview with Mr Stamp, who worships Fellini & has a grudge against Pasolini almost as big as his grudge against Antonioni, but is perceptive about his character/role. And the fact is that Pasolini enabled Stamp to give his greatest performance.
As the interviews & essays discuss, the basic Marx-meets-Freud "theorem" that the bourgeois patriarchal family is upheld by sexual repression is pure 1968, but the film has proved timeless because of its unique mysterious & poetic quality. Also obvious, in retrospect, is that much of the film is really a representation of Pasolini's anxieties over his own homosexuality - mostly displaced onto poor Silvana Magnano, the housewife! Anyway, this is one 60s classic that actually improves with age - much imitated but never bettered - & well worth getting on this DVD edition.

How would you react to pure love?
Pasolini's Theorem portrays what happens to a suburban Italian family visited by an angel who offers each in turn a brief experience of pure love.
The son feels worthless and turns to art to save himself; the mother tries to recreate the experience with teenage boys she cruises in her car; the daughter loses the will to live while the father is driven to total despair. The maid alone finds spiritual meaning but even she is destroyed in the end.
Pasolini's bleak view of materialism is masterful, mysterious and compelling.