Giunti Odeon pays tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini on the 50th anniversary of his death with one of his most famous films. The screening of Teorema is the final event of the workshop dedicated to the great director and the third event in the series organised in collaboration with the Teatro della Toscana, coinciding with the performance Ma a che serve la luce? by Virgilio Sieni (at Teatro della Pergola, 26 and 27 november).

“If a middle-class family received a visit from a young god, whether Dionysus or Jehovah, what would happen?”. This is Pasolini's hypothesis, on which he bases and proceeds to demonstrate by reductio ad absurdum his theorem: “the inability of modern man to perceive, listen to, absorb and live the sacred word”. In 1968, Pasolini created a work in the form of both a novel and a film (originally intended to be a theatrical tragedy). For the first time, the setting is within an upper-middle-class family (in Milan). 

The author imagines that a young and beautiful boy, a mysterious visitor, a god, enters the house and, having carnal relations with all the members of the family, strips them of their false bourgeois respectability and their fragile identity, and then abandons them. After his disappearance, they all fall into a deep crisis and only the maid, of peasant origin (played by the prodigious Laura Betti, Pasolini's friend and companion since the late 1950s), undergoes a beneficial metamorphosis, becoming a sort of “holy madwoman”. The utopia of a definitive crisis of the bourgeoisie is staged by the poet-director with cold colours that correspond to the detachment of the direction, which contemplates the actions as reports of a geometric demonstration. A devastating angel, the Guest is the bearer of an eros that takes on a sacred and purifying function that upsets every coordinate of the bourgeois aquarium and ends with a desolate image of the desert where the father of the family wanders desperately, alone and naked, condemned to scream endlessly.