Mary Poppins & Teorema & My Uncle are three movies about revealers.
Disturbers, revealers, intruders : They land in a family, they watch, they quietly act, and they destroy something, or they fix things, enlighten situations, they reveal. It’s an interesting pattern to watch.
Mary Poppins (1964) : Spoiled and bored upper crust Edwardian English family has their world turned upside down by an all nonsensical nanny who teaches them how to enjoy life.
Teorema (1968) : A strange visitor in a wealthy family. He seduces the maid, the son, the mother, the daughter and finally the father before leaving a few days after. After he’s gone, none of them can continue living as they did.
My Uncle (1958) : Monsieur Hulot visits the technology-driven world of his sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, but he can’t quite fit into the surroundings.
What kind of tools or dials can we find here ?
Poppins is a nanny but as we all know, she saves the father in a pretty dramatic way : he loses his job and understands that flying a colored kite is as important as dealing with money in a bank. Hulot is the typical French grain of sand, disturbing the world around him (clean, organised, ruled), in his poetic absent-minded way. In Teorema… you’ll see.
Dials : Do they do this on purpose ? For each character, what’s the proportion of decisions and randomness in their “goal” ? What happen to them after the change ? What are the levers they used in these families ? What would have happened without them ? After the visit, is everything better ? Worse ? Spoiled ? Destroyed ? Reconstructed ? Is the visitor staying in memories, like a ghost ?
(I found the synopsises in IMDB, thanks)
a french toolbox 