Pride Month Movies Teorema (1968), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Saltburn (2023)
Getting all up in those bourgeois social strata
Teorema (Theorem)
Dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Starring: Silvana Mangano, Terence Stamp, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Dir: Anthony Minghella
Starring: Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Davenport
Saltburn
Dir: Emerald Fennell
Starring: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Alison Oliver
I faced a bit of a dilemma in trying to figure out what film to write about for the B in this year’s pride month. A lot of movies that are considered iconic bisexual films seem to unfold around the trope of the love triangle, and often leave the direct subject of bisexuality unspoken. Sometimes this can be a way of sublimating the same-sex desires of the characters (Takashi Miike’s Gozu, for instance), or introducing drama to an extant relationship, as in The Kids are All Right, but I think bisexuality as such can present issues for films that aren’t willing to adopt the vocabulary of the queer community. Take Brokeback Mountain—Both Jack and Ennis are married to and have children with women, but the story is largely regarded as “the gay cowboy movie” because the majority of the plot and events focus on the emotional and sexual relationship between the two men. One could argue that the two are “actually gay” and hiding it beneath social convention, but I think one of the lessons of queer theory and of regarding sexuality as a spectrum is the way in which neat categories of binary gender attraction are troubled. Men who are attracted to men can and, throughout history, have regularly wed women and raised families while either suppressing or secretly indulging in their desires as they were able.
I could go on at length about the ambiguities of bisexual existence—the mostly-amicable but sometimes messy distinction between bisexuality and pansexuality, the image of the bisexual villain in media and how many of them are iconic despite being “bad” representation, the differing attitudes to bisexuality depending on if its a man or woman who experiences same-sex attraction—but I’ll save all that for some other time. Point is, I was looking online, and saw Teorema mentioned.
Now, I had only heard of Teorema recently in relationship to the 2023 movie Saltburn—a movie that I found to be perfectly adequate as a kind of erotic-thriller focused on a grifter who insinuates himself into a wealthy family with the aim of seducing them and inheriting their wealth. After I watched Saltburn (and wrote about it on an earlier version of this blog) I saw a number of people say that the film was a clear knock-off of other films like Teorema, Brideshead Revisited, and especially The Talented Mr. Ripley. So, after watching Teorema and finding that comparison superficial, I decided to check out Ripley just to kind of complete the trifecta.
3,000 foot view (the broad strokes)
In broad strokes, the movies each share a basic plot device—a mysterious young man inserts himself into the life of a well-to-do family, and begins emotionally and or sexually involving himself in their lives. In so doing, the family is led to ruin. Some themes of class are present, but not always fully developed. I feel like I could make a venn diagram that shows some of what the films have in common, but that’s the basic strokes.
300 foot view (sex)
Each movie has some thoughts about class and repression. In all three films, the family that the visitor inserts himself into are rich and have issues either within the folds of their members, or with society more generally. This tension is very thematically important in Teorema and Saltburn, but less so in Ripley, where the film fixes more of its focus on the personalities of the characters. Additionally, the sexual politics of each film are handled differently.
Teorema, while perhaps one of the more overtly sexual of the three films, actually is quite restrained in the way it depicts that sexual activity. That film’s visitor (called The Visitor, played by Stamp) ends up in liaisons with every member of the household (mother, father, son, daughter, and housekeeper), but the details of these encounters are usually quite tender and tame. Housekeeper Emilia lifts her skirt along her legs in a silent invitation to The Visitor, but he moves her skirt back down without a word. When The Visitor visits the father, Paolo, he lifts Paolo’s legs onto his shoulders and holds them in place, but both men keep their clothes on the entire time. It’s only through implication that any of the sex in Teorema happens, with some minor exceptions when it comes to the mother of the family, Lucia.
Saltburn, meanwhile, is quite overt with its sexual activities. This obviously isn’t entirely just chocked up to “the times.” Pasolini was no stranger to sexual content in his films. Saltburn, for whatever faults it might have, is at least creative with the ways it shows Ollie’s (Keoghan) fixations with the Cattons. He drinks up the semen-infused bathwater from the drain after son Felix (Elordi) has taken a bath, he goes down on daughter Venetia (Alison Oliver) while she’s menstruating, concretizing his parasitic status as a “vampire.” He gives cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) a handjob in furtherance of one of his schemes. Sex is part of power and possession for Ollie. His oral fixations early on mimic consumption, and his later dalliances with gravesoil and the Saltburn estate itself mirror his progressive envelopment within the Catton’s life.
In Ripley, by contrast, sex is more latent—a side-product of Tom’s desires for Dickie (Law) that manifests through a few insinuations here and there, and really only flourishes late in the movie once Tom strikes up a relationship with Peter (Jack Davenport). Outside of some perfunctory flirtations with Marge (Paltrow) and Meredith (Cate Blanchett), Tom really seems more directly gay than either The Visitor or Ollie, as all of his overtly sexual interest is focused squarely on Dickie or Peter, and seems genuine, whereas Ollie’s sexual actions feels more like a piece of his overall sociopathic manipulations.
30 foot view (class)
Returning to the class angle, each of these films does focus on someone inserting themselves into a wealthy family, and bringing about said family’s misery. However, each film seems to focus on a different aspect of this.
For Teorema, the film is both very much about class, and very much not about The Visitor. The family in Teorema are distant and largely silent towards one another—they seem to take little joy in their wealth, and don’t even really object or raise any comment at all about a mysterious man coming to live with them for some time. It’s apparent at the start, but even moreso once The Visitor leaves that the family are hollow. They are bereft of spiritual fulfillment and, having tasted it through the arrival of The Visitor, they seek to find it once more in different locations. Lucia begins pursuing chance liaisons with young men, Paolo gives up his factory, strips naked, and wanders the side of Mt. Etna, their son Pietro (Andrés José Cruz Soublette) begins taking up abstract art, and the daughter Odetta (Anne Wiazemsky) falls catatonic. Having tasted that bit of spiritual and emotional connection, the family seeks out spiritual meaning in faltering and not-quite-successful ways. Pietro’s art is amateurish, like he read a book about how to do abstract art and thinks that by following a particular method he can become Dionysian. Lucia’s trysts seem unfulfilling (she never seems to react very strongly or positively to them), and I chock that up to the fact that she’s not willing to give herself fully to what her own desires are. The only member of the household who seems to find a kind of transcendence is Emilia, who becomes a kind of local mystic, sitting alone in an abandoned lot, abstaining from eating anything but nettle soup, and becoming an object of local veneration until she eventually becomes literally untethered from the world. Only by abandoning their class can the family, slowly, begin to taste that spiritual love they knew through The Visitor.
In Ripley, class is ominpresent but also kind of abstract, as Tom first insinuates himself into the wealthy Greenleaf family as a visitor, and later fully begins to impersonate Dickie once he murders him. Tom begins the film as a hotel bellhop who occasionally gets gigs playing piano at functions attended by the wealthy. As the film progresses, he is able to leech off of the largesse of the Greenleafs, and it is clear that he has some intentionality behind this that only becomes more striking when he starts living as Dickie. That said, the focus of the movie seems to be more on Tom and his lack of a central identity. Tom attempts to live “the good life” through Dickie’s access to money, only to find himself constantly having to bat off family and investigators who threaten to uncover his misdeeds. I am of the opinion that the end of the film, where Tom kills Peter while Peter confides in him what he admires about Tom, Tom may finally begin to realize his mistake as this last murder will almost certainly be his undoing. It’s only there, at the end, that he comes to understand that he could have been loved for himself, without needing to pretend to be someone else—but it’s too late for that.
Saltburn seems to position class as a possession to be envied, and as a social shield that obscures the world from sight. The Cattons are generally polite, if a bit callous in their disregard for their less well-off friends. There’s a lot of Parasite at play in the portrayal of the Cattons. They’re similar to the Park family in that they are mostly obliging and cheery, but occupy a place of privilege that allows them to be that way. I’ve seen some people say that Saltburn functions as a defense of the upper class in presenting them as a victimized people chased after by a conniving middle class person. Maybe it’s just my U.S. background, but to me I think Ollie would be lauded by the tycoons of the U.S. for his cunning and ruthlessness in pursuing his goals. Ollie’s a villain, but he’s still the protagonist of the film, and the film portrays his eventual usurpation of the Cattons in triumphant shots of him, unencumbered by his charade, dancing naked through the halls of Saltburn to “Murder on the Dance Floor.”
3-foot view (directorial choices)
It’s interesting to me that each of these directors definitely made some choices that helped or harmed their film along the way. For Pasolini, I personally think that the decision to comment on the spiritual emptiness of the bourgeoisie by focusing on a family of empty people who barely even talk or emote was a better choice in theory than in practice. In theory, the family’s silence and lack of interest or depth shows the kind of emptiness wealth brings about in contrast to the kind of transcendence that working-class Emilia finds in her vigil. However, in practice, it means the movie is largely focused on boring people trying and failing to not be boring because they got some good dick once.
In Ripley, apparently the sexuality of the characters is played up compared to the original novel from what I’ve heard. I think this was an obvious choice to make, as Tom’s parasitic fixation on Dickie and the Greenleafs seems implicitly sexual. He’s doing the Dennis Reynolds thing about “getting off” by being “inside another man’s skin,” an idea that is rife with same-sex desire.
For Saltburn, I turn to an interview that Emerald Fennell gave with Time magazine. When asked about the bathtub scene and whether or not she intended it to be shocking, Fennell references Catherine Breillat’s idea that sexual tension does not exist between people, but between desire and revulsion. Ollie assures us at the beginning of the film that he did “love” Felix. I read that statement as a way of prefacing how his love for Felix translated into a desire for what Felix possessed, for Saltburn more generally. It’s easy to conceptualize a person attempting to scheme their way into owning a mansion. It’s kind of pat, and plays into the sorts of class fears that films like Parasite explore. The key distinction that I think Saltburn brings is in the lengths the characters will go to above and beyond their pure self-interest. Ollie doesn’t need to suck bathwater from a drain, he does so because he seeks control and possession. the lengths that the characters will go to above and beyond purely material gain. Indeed, the moments where he acts to ensure his own parasitic survival tend to be the ones where he causes the most friction within the family (ousting Farleigh, murdering Felix, etc.).
While The Visitor probably went back up to heaven (he’s kind of a divine figure), and Tom will probably languish in the basement with the guilt he feels, Ollie relishes the hell he’s made for himself.
Stray Thoughts
Tom should have just told Meredith that she was mistaken when she called him Dickie. Said “Oh, sorry. He and I were friends. Lot of people said we looked alike. Common mistake.” and moved on.
One other film that I think provides a humorous parallel to these works is Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q—could be a very fun chaser for a movie night after watching Ripley or Saltburn.
Speaking a bit on the “shocking” scenes in Saltburn, I don’t consider the “vampire” scene to be that shocking, honestly. I mean, blood of any sort is unsanitary, but if all parties involved in a sexual act that takes place during menstruation are on board, I don’t see the problem. Not to mention, there’s a lot of stigma that gets put on women for having periods at all that is just kind of sad.