THE VISITOR
BRUCE LABRUCE
Cast and produced in London by a/political, The Visitor is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s classic film Teorema (1968). In Pasolini’s original, Terence Stamp plays a mysterious character only identified in the credits as “The Visitor.” The origin of this character is never explained, as he infiltrates an upper class Milanese family, gains their trust, and seduces them one by one – the frustrated mother, the alienated father, the delicate son, the innocent daughter, and the devoutly religious maid. LaBruce’s film takes the charged sexual content of the original text and makes it explicit, reversing the dominating rhetoric in politics and the press on the sexualized violence of refugees. The ‘alien’ instead becomes a sexual healer, a sensitive subject he has explored before through the trope of the Black male’s sexual potency as a threat to the ‘domesticated’ white bourgeois sexual repression.
