Director Pier Paolo Pasolini with Terence Stamp and Silvana Mangano

An enigmatic, detached film that skewered the uptight, acquisitive bourgeoisie in a very 1960s/70s fashion. I’m not sure how to think of its attitude to the church though: was the maid’s transformation a satire or an allegory?

A stranger arrives at a Milanese industrialist’s house, seduces each member of the household and leaves. His arrival and departure are heralded by an arm-waving postman. Gabriel or a comic turn? (That’s what I mean about the church.) Each person is transformed by contact with the stranger. The daughter falls into a coma; the maid works miracles; the son perhaps finds his creative energy (depends on your POV I suppose); the wife takes to picking up young men, which could be seen as sexually liberating or despairing, again depending on your POV; and the husband throws off all his trammels – factory and clothes – and ends the film screaming, naked and alone, on Mount Etna. Shades of Stromboli and, somehow, Samuel Beckett.

What also struck me about it was its queer sensibility, which was so different from traditional films, and its reticence. Apparently Pasolini worked with Fellini – but Theorem couldn’t be further removed from the joyful, vital pile-up of something like 8¹⁄₂!