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On the most literal level, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s elliptical, spiritual-cum-sensual movie Teorema (1968) is about an entire family being driven to distraction by their mutual desire to have sex with Terence Stamp Viewed from this angle, it is realistic enough that it might be reclassified as a documentary – theirs is, after all, an understandable insanity, shared by many moviegoers in the sixties and beyond Only 923 words end up being spoken over Teorema’s 90-minute running time, and because Terence Stamp does not, as it turns out, actually speak Italian, the 25 or so allotted to his character are dubbed That Pasolini cast him anyway is testament to both his wattage as an actor, and to Pasolini’s innate understanding of lust as a thing that is removed from language, totally unbound by reason, and as sudden and inexplicable as a miracle What Stamp possesses is an air of glamour, in the most traditional and most supernatural sense – ‘a sort of spell,’ the writer Autumn Whitefield-Madrado wrote in 2015, citing the old Scottish word glamer as its root, ‘that would affect the eyesight of those afflicted, so that objects appear different than they actually are’    The family in Teorema are both rich and unfulfilled, their lives luxurious but stultifying and empty, until one day they receive a mysterious telegram informing them that someone called ‘The Visitor’ will arrive shortly When he does, because he looks the way he does – those bright teal eyes and that absurd, almost feminine cupid’s bow, the whole face somehow simultaneously innocent and evil – it is as if some obvious force of nature, like a hurricane or a Biblical flood, has burst into their bourgeois home and swept away their inhibitions Who are they to deny beauty in all of its terrible strength, its divine power? Who could possibly resist what has been carefully designed, either by nature or by God, to be entirely irresistible? The first to fall prey to his eerie magnetism is the maid, who is so moved and so unsettled that she cries just looking at him and then rushes