Presented in the Panorama section of the 74th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival and nominated for a Teddy Award, The Visitor was directed by the well-known Bruce LaBruce, and represents one of those attempts to create something artistically relevant and politically provocative that ultimately ends in a spectacular flop. This endeavor (more like a gagging actually) clearly testifies to the director’s passion for the rebellious authorship of Italian cinema in the 1970s. Films like Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Abbuffata (1973), or some of Pasolini’s works are undoubtedly the spiritual fathers of The Visitor, but “spiritual fathers” is a term far too lofty. Let’s say that the film seems to borrow here and there, some specific ideas, mixing them with effects that result as disgusting without being provocative, sexual without being erotic, and bizarre without being ingenious. Undoubtedly, the director’s failed intention was to make a sort of British remake of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), in the tale of a stranger, a foreigner, who comes to disrupt the presumed bourgeois order, endowed with a fascination and mesmerizing properties that range from sleeping with every member of the family to causing a much larger upheaval of the entire residence and its inhabitants, a true spiritual revolution that goes through the flesh. Had he simply chosen to make something like a pornographic remake of Teorema, perhaps it could have been interesting…but the question is not what you want to do but how you do it.
In The Visitor, the stranger is embodied as a refugee who arrives at the banks of the Thames from inside a suitcase, just like many other refugees who nakedly emerge in various parts of the city. Dressed as a homeless person, he then goes to a family of the British upper class, who welcome him as the maid’s nephew and offer him a job as a servant, which he accepts. The premises were definitely interesting and very current, and even the idea of continuing the thread of Teorema with the protagonist as a refugee, entering the upper-class household as a stranger and ending up like in the Italian cinematic masterpiece to sexually disturb every member of it and determine a profound transformation for all. But everything else is absolutely botched. The directorial rendering is rather grotesque, and the atmosphere soon becomes almost that of a porn film without clear artistic ideas, only with the failed intention of creating something modern but reminiscent of not only Teorema but also Salò o le 120 Giornate di Sodoma (1975), trying forcibly to echo the general tone to the point of almost openly quoting the well-known scenes of coprophagy. The Visitortherefore wants to be a film of atmosphere, a shocking one, but it seems to be supported not so much by an artistic or political vision as simply by the taste for horror and the idea of stirring solely for its own sake. There is no discourse, no thought, no idea, but only often disturbing images that pile up for no reason.
At the end of the film, one wonders not only why they chose to watch it, but why they chose to make it in the first place. If one is not able to pay tribute to extraordinary directors of the calibre of Pasolini or Ferreri, then it is best to leave them alone, because a gaze towards them that is not supported by a depth of artistic vision – which can be very different but must be sincere and real – then it is simply an insult to their greatness. In short, if this film wanted to generate a sense of disgust in the audience, it succeeded. But was that really all the director wanted to convey?
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