Teorama

Only a critical studies student could love Pier Paolo Pasolini's glib fable. Terence Stamp, who made a good living as an iconic Swinging 60s polymorph, is here a kind of visiting angel or Eros, who liberates a wealthy Italian bourgeois family by having sex with each of them as well as their housemaid then departs, leaving them to self-destruct in various ways - the husband gives his factory away, the wife becomes a nympho, the daughter a catatonic and so on.

Pasolini was charged with obscenity by the Italian government over the film but was acquitted. They would have been better advised to sue him for wasting everyone's time. Godard could handle this kind of material because he simultaneously used the formal means to make his case and so embedded his projects with a broader arsenal of deconstructive strategies, although not necessarily therefore less tiresome for it. Pasolini's one-dimensional "symbolic" approach, which may have had some believers in the heady anti-establishmentarian 1960s, now looks simply twee and self-indulgent. Pasolini would continue his sexual preoccupations through to the '70s, reaching their nadir in Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom in 1975.

 

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