“The Visitor”, interview with the director Bruce La Bruce

February 21, 2024

Bruce La Bruce, director, "The Visitor". An outrageously refreshing new take on Pasolini's Teorema, a manifesto on sexula liberation.

"The Visitor", interview with the director Bruce La Bruce Angelo Acerbi

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Bruce la Bruce comes back to Berlinale with his latest film, “The Visitor“, included in the Panorama section. The film is an art piece, a provocative tale, a new rendition of Pasolini’s Teorema, a new exploration on sexual liberation.

Pasolini still resonates

The idea of “The Visitor” comes from the consideration on how modern and contemporary Pasolini still is. His view on power in sexual relationships lead bruce la bruce to this film, and he is wondering which sensual movies Pasolini could have done if he was still alive.

Art and contemporary social issues

“The Visitor” was born as an art piece, that blossomed into a film, with influences on social issues. The stranger form Teorema becomes a migrant, a black mana, with all the political and social and sexual implications that this choice brings in a bourgeois family, that has lost sight of reality.

Plot

The Visitor is a British-set reimagining of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema. Pasolini’s enigmatic protagonist, known to everyone as “the visitor”, arrives at the house of an upper-class family and seduces each family member one after the other. When he suddenly departs, he leaves behind an emptiness for which the rest attempt to compensate in different ways. In Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor, it is a refugee who washes up in a small suitcase on the banks of the River Thames in London. He is one of several identical-looking men who simultaneously emerge from suitcases in other locations around the city. Dressed in the guise of a homeless man, he arrives at the house of an upper-class family and gets to know the maid. When she passes him off as her nephew, the family invites him to also work for them as a live-in servant. The guest makes love with each of the residents of the house one after the other, depicted in explicit sex scenes. Each member of the household experiences a radical sexual and spiritual transformation.

Written by: Angelo Acerbi

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Bruce La Bruce