The Brooklyn Rail

Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor (2024) opens with a screen of electric yellow, the words “To PPP” emblazoned in bright red. The film’s debt to Pier Paolo Pasolini—more specifically to his Teorema (1968)—thus appears spelled out from the start. Its precise relationship to the original remains, however, fittingly provocative. Alongside critical accolades at the time of its release, Teorema found itself denounced by Pope Paul VI and briefly retracted from circulation on charges of obscenity. If The Visitor reprises the crisp symmetry of Pasolini’s cinematic parable, it also takes the erotic frisson to a higher mathematics of sexual deviance. A self-styled “reimagining” (rather than a remake), LaBruce’s film takes felicitous liberties with Pasolini’s script—not only in terms of casting and setting but also pornographic hyperbole and ideological upshot. First screened at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, The Visitor had its American debut with the New People’s Cinema Club in Brooklyn, where the director engaged in a lively Q&A with the writer and musician Brontez Purnell. Their exchange proved as exuberant and incisive as the film itself.

Pasolini’s Teorema centered on an upper middle-class family in the genteel suburbs of Milan, where a telegram announces the advent of a nameless visitor. With nearly wordless charisma, a handsome man with piercing blue eyes (played by the British actor Terence Stamp) arrives to unravel the clockwork of nuclear domesticity, seducing each family member in turn: father, mother, brother, sister. Departing as abruptly as he appeared, the enigmatic guest leaves them all in the grips of mental illness. As much as an erotic phenomenon, his presence—and then absence—amounts to a devastatingly supernatural experience, revealing to each family member the fatal emptiness of their existence. It is only the working-class maid for whom the visitor brings salvation. Abandoning the disenchantment of modern urban life, she performs miracles in her home village before having herself buried alive like some ancient martyr. Connected still to the earth, to peasant mores, she not only survives the visitor’s godlike transcendence, but is elevated by it (quite literally: she comes to levitate before an awestruck crowd).

LaBruce’s film updates Teorema temporally, spatially, and socially. To begin with, it presents the eponymous protagonist not as some casual caller but an undocumented immigrant—one who actually washes ashore on the banks of London’s Thames. A homeless Brit finds a drifting suitcase on a derelict slice of waterfront and unzips it to reveal a naked, muscular man of plainly African descent. Unharmed by his journey, the man proceeds to walk through the streets to the home he will soon transform. All the while, a dour male voice intones in what sounds like a radio transmission:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. I see the River Thames foaming with much blood. We must be mad—literally mad as a nation to be committing the annual influx of such dangerous aliens. It is like watching a nation busily engaged heaping up its own funeral pyre.

Some viewers might recognize here the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech by the former British politician Enoch Powell, who, in 1968, decried the mounting influx to the United Kingdom of (brown and Black) immigrants, many of them from the Commonwealth (i.e., former British colonies). Yet as the camera continues its focus on the visitor’s glistening black skin, this same voice continues its screed with increasingly contemporary allusions.

Is he fleeing conflict and persecution? I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins, and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care. … The illegal migration bill will allow us to stop the boats that are bringing these delinquents to our shores in flagrant breach of our laws … Last week my right honorable Friend the Prime Minister announced a world-first deal with Rwanda … Those who make dangerous, illegal or unnecessary journeys to claim asylum in the UK may now be relocated to Rwanda.

Disparate—and recent—sources feed into this single stream of xenophobic vitriol, taken word for word from recent discourses by Katie Hopkins (a far-right English political commentator and former star of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice); by Suella Braverman (the home secretary for the last Tory government); and by Tom Pursglove (the Conservative politician and former Minister of State for Legal Migration and the Border).

Lest these samples of racist bile seem too easily dismissible as the rantings of right-wing nutjobs, LaBruce barely alters some of Winston Churchill’s less familiar (and less altruistic) utterances. As the camera focuses closely on the visitor’s Black body, the same grave radio voice drones: “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of deportations [gas, in Churchill’s original]. I am strongly in favor of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes.” LaBruce thus imposes on the narrative an ineluctable contemporaneity: the ongoing plight of African migrants to Europe and reactionary resistance to their arrival. We know right off the bat that whatever allegorical potency this gloss on Teorema might retain, it refuses to keep the present’s political contingencies at bay.

Pasolini had originally planned to set his film in New York, casting Terence Stamp because his physiognomy suggested an “American type.” Yet it is the blithe imperviousness of the film’s family to history (of which they are so unwittingly emblematic) which, in Pasolini’s telling, bespeaks their hollowness. By contrast, LaBruce’s visitor appears “other” in more than a merely metaphorical sense; he is an “alien” in racial, national, and legal terms. Situating the entirely white family’s household in a posh, twenty-first century London estate sets this difference into stark relief. (The visitor’s eyes also appear entirely white during certain sex scenes, rendering him unsettlingly “alien” in physical terms.) The film scrambles—productively, provocatively—the film’s ideological coordinates.

Apart from The Visitor’s uninhibited sexual content (on which more shortly), the titular character’s ethnicity initially seems to be the film’s most striking digression from Pasolinian precedent. Yet he enters a household already subversive of patriarchal expectations. In a sense, though the visitor will come in due course to fuck every member of the family (the term “make love” does no justice to the scenes’ pornographic intensity), the family members do not appear rigidly conformist (or sexually reticent) in their own right. The male maid who answers the door and hires the visitor as a fellow domestic (pretending to be his uncle) appears outfitted in a woman’s frock. The paterfamilias sports a tightly cropped mustache and high fade which read (to a gay male viewer, at least) as queer. The daughter is played by the transmasculine performer Ray Filar.

The visitor’s own erotic energy transcends conventional heterosexuality, a deviance which his donning of a maid’s corset dress makes plain early on. “I’m a pansexual revolutionary,” he tells his hosts. The contiguity between the character and the individual playing him—the burlesque performer and porn star Bishop Black—recalls something of Pasolini’s affinity for actors drawn from the subproletariat milieu on which he trained his camera. More remarkable—and more interesting—are the ways in which LaBruce departs from the Italian director’s example. Those departures often entail citations of various sources, including other works by Pasolini. The latter’s final, infamous film Salò (1975) features Fascist libertines (dressed up in drag at one point) alongside all manner of sexual content, from urination to sadomasochism.

Pasolini’s entire oeuvre sets erotic desire into tension with a latent cultural Catholicism. But when a Christ-shaped dildo appears in The Visitor, we must take LaBruce at his word when he avers to “take things to their logical conclusion. Catholicism is the most fetishistic religion on [the] planet.” One critic has aptly described The Visitor as “Pasolini via early John Waters.” Indeed, Waters-like outlandishness emerges early and often, beginning with the simulated coprophagy that inaugurates the protagonist’s arrival: he and the maid prepare a dinner of piss and shit which the family eats with relish. (And it is significant that Waters himself recently dedicated an entire spoken album to the Italian writer-director with his Prayer to Pasolini [2021]). In addition to Divine’s consumption of (actual) dog excrement in Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), the scene conjures up Salò’s banquet in which the Fascist libertines and their victims consume a meal of shit (simulated through chocolate and jam). LaBruce drains the allegorical resonance from the Salò scene. But he also renders Teorema’s sexual content vigorously explicit. Part of Teorema’s uneasy seduction lays in its use of silence and ellipsis—characters whose sexual activity is largely imagined offscreen or sublimated into other acts. The Visitor not only finds its family members voicing the effect of the guest upon them (“You have annihilated my identity,” the father tells the visitor just before his departure); we see, in close-up detail, his sweaty domination of their bodies.

“Porn,” LaBruce quipped, “is my medium.” In some ways he simply hyperbolizes what was already there (just as Teorema plays upon the eroticism barely concealed in Christological iconography). The father in Pasolini’s film rests his legs on the visitor’s shoulders to ease his back pain; The Visitor figures this as an act of homosexual anal sex. In a similar vein, the daughter in Teorema watches this same moment of hushed intimacy between her father and the guest; in The Visitor, this becomes an event of explicitly incestuous relations. Even the maid, seized with paroxysms of transcendent pleasure in their encounter with the visitor, practices auto-asphyxiation—not, then, a mortification of the self, but a redoubled eroticism. The soundstage’s cramped quarters (at the offices in Kennington) intensify the close-ups by cinematographer Jack Hamilton, whose lens revels in bodies (male, female, cisgender, transgender) smothered in copious amounts of lube. The protagonist’s coupling with different family members offers up a smorgasbord of polymorphous perversity, as LaBruce unselfconsciously blurs the lines between art cinema and porn.

It’s more than smut. Brightly colored political—and decidedly droll—slogans repeatedly flash over these scenes. “Open borders, open legs.” “Fuck for the many not for the few.” “Colonize the colonizer; invade the invader.” “Make (Revolutionary) Love Not (Colonialist) War.” “Eat out the Rich!” Imperialism has come home to roost—in different orifices. If the British despoiled various cultures of their materials and labor, they lost something of their soul in the process. The self-knowledge which the visitor brings his benighted hosts is not merely carnal but metaphysical. But where Pasolini felt content to leave this implicit, LaBruce has his characters spell it out—a gambit that exchanges melancholy for camp.

As he sits down to a final dinner with them, the guest announces that the sexual vivacity with which he has ravished his hosts is extraordinary only because of their false consciousness. “Where I come from,” he remarks, “my powers are natural and commonplace.” His final monologue (absent from Teorema) imports into The Visitor something of the revolutionary Christ from Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964): “I have come to wreak havoc and also to plant the seed of new life.” Witnessing the family’s surprise at his announced departure, the visitor replies sharply: “I am not your magical negro.” Yet as Brontez Purnell pointed out to LaBruce after the film’s screening, this resonance is inevitable. “Was there not one white top available for the role?” he ribbed the director to raucous laughter.

Despite its humor, the question is an incisive one, given the guest’s outsized (ahem) sexual potency and the racist tropes it invokes (in art and porn alike). In trying to head off the trope of fetishization from within the film itself, LaBruce perhaps hoped to have it both ways. A comparable example (though one steeped in peremptory hetero swagger) might be Tarantino’s pastiches of cinematic genres and their attendant sexual and racial stereotypes. His intended subversion of cliché is premised upon its familiar, even offensive invocation. For those in on the joke, irony rescues the material from offensiveness. But other viewers (and even many attuned to the critical undertow) end up consuming the commonplace at face value, ignorant of—or indifferent to—its potentially critical dimensions. To be sure, The Visitor manages just the right admixture of self-consciousness and irrepressible levity. The film’s political bent is unmistakable even (or especially) as it is leavened with humor.

Teorema treated the cultural, moral, and affective aridity of Italy’s bourgeois classes—revealed to be impotent even (or especially) in their attempts at sexual revolution. LaBruce further queers the story as he takes it over the top. The foils to The Visitor’s Black “alien” are queer and trans individuals. The film thus rewires the coordinates of progressive integrity (and its expected apposition to sexual/gender nonconformity). But aside from this, it is the relentless literalization of Teorema’s subtleties which makes it so amusing. The cheek (and tongue) with which LaBruce approaches Pasolini’s material honors the original—and lends it new relevance—in transforming it. The maid in The Visitor does not merely levitate at the film’s end, but does so at the Catholic shrine of Lourdes. The mathematical symmetry of Pasolini’s “theorem” also becomes literalized in a transparent, multicolored grid, intermittently superimposed on the film. Its red, brown, yellow, and white colors evoke various bodily fluids and shit.

These crude allusions stand in inverse proportion to their stylization, and to the film’s formal elegance at large. The fact that it was first presented as a multi-screen installation during Frieze’s London art fair lends further sense to that formalism. The simultaneous projection of different scenes on various screens not only underscored the narrative’s almost geometric multiplicity, but further drew out the painterly effect of its saturated hues. Hamilton occasionally manages to pull back his camera and train it upon frontally arranged compositions, revealing a painterly sensibility that envies little of Pasolini’s self-confessed “plastic” approach to film. The effect is less that of quattrocento altarpieces (Pasolini’s predilection) than Baroque oil painting, with the film’s final dinner scene—its disposition of bodies, its solemn use of light—evoking nothing if not Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600).

Pasolini writes in a 1974 essay that Caravaggio’s use of light prefigured cinematographic imagery. Equally relevant to The Visitor is his remark that Caravaggio brought into the frame individuals “marginalized by the cultural ideology of the previous two centuries.” LaBruce does not merely feature such individuals as worthy of dramatic vision in The Visitor. He allows them to scandalize while taking their bodily pleasures—the corporeal ordinariness—for granted.

For Pasolini, sexual liberation under late capitalism—and the consumerism that it enshrined—was a contradiction in terms. Ostensible freedoms, even the most seemingly transgressive, remained tamed by an inexorably coercive regime, dressed up in the guise of (false) tolerance. This did not mean he renounced his assaults upon society’s false pieties. “I believe,” he remarked to a French television interviewer just days before his murder in 1975, “that to scandalize is a duty, to be scandalized is a pleasure, and to refuse to be scandalized is moralism.”

LaBruce’s duty has been fulfilled. Whether or not The Visitor’s imagery pleasures will depend on the public’s nature and place and tastes. The film’s cinematic allusions and aesthetic sensibility nuance its reflection on a number of vital themes. Then again, sometimes a cock is just a cock. LaBruce is determined to let the camera revel in the pleasures of flesh at the expense of narrative precision. But at a moment when non-European and queer and trans individuals are denigrated (or worse) as alien, the film’s sensational erotics bespeak—perhaps despite themselves—an abidingly symbolic defiance.