Lilies That Fester

Director Pier Paolo Pasolini is a film festival of contradictions. An avowed Communist and atheist, he made his most celebrated movie an evocation of Christian drama: The Gospel According to St. Matthew. In his newest film, Teorema (English translation: Theorem), Pasolini takes images of voluptuous beauty and physical love and turns them into a film of suppurating ugliness, most of it unintentional.

A figure of arguably divine characteristics (Terence Stamp) visits an industrialist's home in Milan. His stay is brief, but during it he manages to make love to the maid, the wife, the industrialist, the daughter and the son of the household. The passion is so indiscriminate and the acting so undisciplined that one half-expects to see the milkman, and perhaps his horse, included in the rutting. But Pasolini has other excesses in mind. When the visitor departs, he leaves behind a shrilling choir of victims. The daughter (Anne Wiazemsky) becomes catatonic; the son, an artist, urinates on his paintings; the wife turns nymphomaniac. The maid becomes a martyr who levitates to prove her sanctity, and the father strips to the buff in a Milan railroad station, then flees to the Dolomites bellowing like an enraged bull.

The viewer is soon filled with an identical emotion. Every other shot, it seems, is the crotch of a pair of male dungarees; every adolescent attempt at high metaphysics recalls the warning that mysticism begins with mist and ends in schism. In his soft-centered drama of sex as destroyer and healer, the once promising film maker sedulously apes D. H. Lawrence, whom he seems to have both studied and misunderstood. In the future, Pasolini might well heed an earlier author, whose Sonnet 94 could have been addressed to artists who inflict private fantasies on their public:

The sweetest things turn sourest by

their deeds

Lilies that fester smell far worse than

weeds.

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