Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 masterpiece Teorema was released with the tagline: There are only 923 words spoken in “Teorema” – but it says everything!
Teorema is about a mysterious stranger who has sex with every member of a bourgeois family revealing the cracks in their veneer. Despite its salacious premise, it opts for silence and abstraction over overt messaging.
It’s no surprise given the increasing wealth gap, takes on this narrative have begun popping up all over the world. There was Saltburn in the UK, A Brief History of a Family in China, and now Mariana Wainstein’s Linda in Argentina. Of these neo-Teoremas, it’s Linda that stands apart, crafting its own — still sexy, still meaningful — approach to this story.
The titular Linda (China Suárez) arrives at a bourgeois family’s home taking over for her cousin who is ill. The matriarch (Julieta Cardinali) hands Linda her cousin’s uniform, hoping Linda will play the part of servant to her expectations. Linda doesn’t argue, she just never puts on the clothes. This will continue to be her approach. She does her job and does it well, but she will not engage with the behaviors of this family. This refusal of ownership causes each one of them to fall in love and lust, desperate to own Linda in another way.
Wainstein wisely understands gender swapping Teorema changes the entire dynamic. For a beautiful woman to have sex with every member of this family would not be to destroy it but to be used further. The way she destroys each of them is personalized — sexuality as a tool can be yielded in many ways.
With the husband (Rafael Spregelburd), she withholds. Not only does she not have sex with him, she goes blank when he flirts. She doesn’t get uncomfortable or smile to appease or give just enough back to keep him happy. She is totally neutral. With the son (Felipe Gonzalez Otaño), her withholding is different. She’s more aggressive. She doesn’t let him disrespect her like he disrespects everyone else. She establishes control. With the daughter (Minerva Casero), she flirts. She establishes a connection and seduces. But she never consummates this dynamic. To have sex with this teenager wouldn’t just be unethical, it would create an unruly bond. Instead, she leads her on just enough to ruin her perfect adolescent heterosexuality. And, finally, with the wife, well, with the wife yeah they fuck.
The dynamics may be complicated, but Wainstein is sharp about the nuances of sexuality and desire. That means the wrongness of the servant/matriarch relationship does not preclude these encounters from being very, very sexy. There are even moments of eroticism in Linda’s encounters with the rest of the family. This works to implicate the audience, forcing us to grapple with our own desire to see Linda sexualized despite her circumstances.
While the film is more grounded than Teorema and clearer in its messaging, Linda’s manipulations and motivations remain subtle. For much of the film’s runtime, we experience a whiplash between the family’s desire for Linda — and our own desire to see sex — with the entitlement and cruelty of the family’s behavior.
Linda isn’t just the best of recent films with a Teorema-like narrative. It’s also one of the best of recent class satires. It may have more than 923 words, but like its lead character it knows when to withhold.
