Padre Padrone

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Paolo and Vittorio Taviani first garnered critical attention with this adaptation of Gavino Ledda's autobiography, winning both the Golden Palm and the Critics Prize at Cannes in 1977. Gavino's father pulls him out of elementary school at the age of 6 to force him into the life of a Sardinian shepherd, often severely beating him. Yet Gavino's illiteracy spurs him on to eventually earn a university degree on Sardinian dialects. And it's his journey from the cruel, solitary, animal world of shepherding under the yoke of his tyrant Padre, to that of a writer and a linguist that forms the body of this tale. But more, it's a showcase for the talents of the Taviani brothers, whose style keeps us distant from their subject, like a child watching an ant colony.

There's a moment in Padre Padrone ("Father Master" for those who want to be clued in to the film's political rumblings from the get-go) that typifies the best and worst it has to offer. Gavino, having had a violent argument with his father, decides to leave home to keep the peace, but must retrieve a valise that's under the bed his father is currently sitting on. This brings the top of his head conveniently close to Padre, whose hand absently moves to pat him on the noggin, but instead raises in a fascistic fist of rage. The ambivalence of the gesture is pointed, and well taken. But to make the point, the Tavianis have abstracted their characters past all recognition. There is no time in the film when a scene is not a carefully controlled abstraction. Now the characters are all gestures and tableaux, swallowed by pastoral landscapes, markers in its historical sweep rather than flesh-and-blood people. While this might appeal to an audience's sense of intellectual cool, it also deprives them of the richer joys of being allowed under a character's skin. --Jim Gay

Description

This powerful true tale of one boy's struggle out of isolation and silence is perfectly captured on film by the renowed Taviani brothers

Customer Reviews:

The Unsweetened Life of a Shepherd.......2007-05-06

A shepherd pulls his young son out of the first grade to start him on his career as a shepherd. He teaches him necessary survival skills for the job, but beats him for attempting to abandon his duties. The boy reaches his twenty-first year. The father sells almost everything and buys an olive grove which a frost destroys. The young shepherd and his peers plan to immigrate to Germany, but he is sent back while the others leave because his father didn't sign the correct forms and because he is illiterate. The young man gets a grammar school equivalency diploma and joins the army. He makes a friend who helps him to refine his intellect. He learns quickly and decides he wants to continue to University for linguistics. Returning home he is forced to work for his father during the day and study by night. He fails an exam and refuses to work anymore. The father and son have a fight, and the son has to leave. He gets his doctorate and writes an award-winning autobiography. He returns to his hometown to live.
The theme of this film is the wisdom that allows an uneducated, young shepherd to gain an education, fame, and an independent, meaningful existence in the context of patriarchal oppression.
This theme is enhanced by the use of the elements of film style. Editing shows us a sequence in which the face of a patron saint that the boys are carrying in procession turn into the face of Gavino's father. This shows the audience that, metaphorically, Gavino carries the weight of his father on his shoulders. We feel the heavy patriarchal oppression to which he and his peers are subjected. Action shows us Gavino turning the radio volume up when his father asks him to turn it off, and then humming Mozart's clarinet concerto when his father silences the radio by immersing it in water. The audience recognizes that Gavino is finally defying his patronizing father. This action also shows us the dimension of his mind, as it reveals that he is capable of understanding Mozart and of keeping beauty alive in his life. We fear retribution and are at the same time awed by and proud of Gavino's courage. Sound gives us many stream-of-consciousness sequences in which we hear the thoughts of Gavino and other characters. In one such sequence, we hear Gavino connecting the vocabulary he is memorizing to words that he already knows and to feelings he has known but could not name before. "...Languid, lurid, father, fatherly, patriarch, patronize," he says to himself. This allows the audience into Gavino's consciousness, so that we experience growth; we recognize that as he learns new vocabulary, he is also acquiring self-worth.
This film story is culturally valuable because it shows that one man can acquire the wisdom to break the traditional cycle that many--perhaps centuries of--people had not. It is a story, therefore, that is greatly inspirational to anyone who has ever faced opposition to maturation, modernization or creativity. The use of detailed sounds and slow, simple camera movements force the audience's senses to follow Gavino's. When he is alone in the dark, we are alone in the dark. We see a close-up of a snake's poised, open jaw and fear it, just as he does. We hear the wind through the trees as Gavino's father trains him to recognize his location by it. Likewise, the many stream of consciousness scenes allow the audience into Gavino's mind. We also hear fragments of the thoughts of the schoolchildren, Gavino's father, the selfish townspeople at a funeral, and even the sheep Gavino milks. The use of such devices makes the audience take part not only in the physical pain and alienation that was part of a young shepherd's life, but also in the mental neglect and torture that followed. We feel abandoned, fed up, and triumphant as Gavino does. The most important aspect of this film, however, lies in the fact that while Gavino creates his own boundaries and frees himself from patriarchal slavery, he is still self-aware and doesn't turn his story into a fairy tale. He is not living in a mansion with a perfect wife and children at the film's end. Rather, the real Gavino is presented to the audience on the same lonely streets on which he began, looking content but imperfect. This story allows for the fact that there are still sad aspects to his life, and lingering effects to what he experienced. Likewise, none of his experience was sweetened: his life is presented as was, in a beautiful and moving way.

Padre Padrone.......2007-01-20

This is a true story about an Italian author born in Sardinia who developed his potential by sheer determination against very great odds as a child. It is an inspriring salute to the strength of the human spirit. One scene in particular is the most moving I have ever witnessed in cinema.

Seeing the film again after over 20 years rekindled all my great memories and reinforced my long-held opinions of it. I only wished that the film had been made using today's superior cinematography and production standards, without however changing the story or style.

Well-done, some strange moments if you don't object.......2006-01-19

No matter how preserving, redemptive, or moving, this 1977 Cannes Festival winner comes across, it has it's weird moments. Padre Padrone is translated to Father, the Boss. The story encompasses abuse, brutality, bestiality, religion, oppression, etc. The directors, the Taviani brothers, are intent at depicting this barbaric existence.

Based on the autobiographical story of Gavino Ledda, an illiterate sheepherder who escaped his father's rule, joined the military, was self-taught and became professor of linguistics.

Gavino is hauled away from school at the age of 7 by his father who needs his son to watch the sheep, and that his education will come at 18 years of age. He orders the boy to live in the fields day and night. We see the abusive treatment his father imposes and we are privy to some sickening bestiality moments (by the younger children who are also sheepherders).

But the childhood scenes are quickly relayed to Gavino years later, as a young man. And there are more strange interactions within his family. Too many scenes are left to your imagination as to what is happening or we are left with little clue as to why.

When he escapes life as a sheepherder, Gavino joins the military. It is here that his speech doesn't compare to the others he becomes self-educated in phonetics and he becomes a radio operator, I believe it is. Then, he goes back home to the village and confronts his father. Here, we get a better understanding of the conflict to come.

.....Marrianne Rizzuto

Harsh but exhilirating.......2005-09-20

There's no shortage of grit and unpleasantness in Padre Padrone, the kind of film you really couldn't make today - violent child beatings, animals beaten, killed or worse on screen (I really wasn't expecting the montage of donkey and chicken molesting) and a distinct lack of any sentimentality. But the Taviani Brothers' film is still one of the best I've seen this year, turning what could easily have been an exercise in miserablism into a remarkable and occasionally anarchic but always imaginative piece of pure filmmaking. From its great opening, where the real Gavino hands the actor playing his father the stick he will use to beat him as a child, there's an intelligent audacity that manifests itself in a world where animals and even music have voices if you know how to listen: the battle of wills between Gavino and a goat played out in voice over, or the voice overs of the school children whose laughter at Gavino's fate turns to horror as they realize they are next are just two great examples. Some shots manage to be strangely beautiful in spite of their context or even, odd as it sounds, their visual quality - the tracking shot of leaving the village, the long take of the father hurrying home to kill his son. The film also has a superlative use of sound, creating a sense of place out of the sounds as much of the sights in Gavino's first night in the pasture.

The two hours fly by, but burn themelves into your memory. It's just a shame that Fox Lorber's DVD is such poor quality.

father and son relation as never seen before.......2005-09-16

A great movie full of deep intense moments,fomented by the nasty character of Abramo,the possessive and controlling father of a young Gavino who too soon discovers what's the real life is made of.Filmed in the deeper side of an almost ancient and beautiful Sardinia countryside this film will move you deeply.
The relations between father and son is taken to a new level as rarely have been documented on celluloid.Like it or not this movie will move you and will touch all the right buttons in the rediscovery of any parental relationship.
The only minor point is the bad translation of the original to DVD format.

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