Review
Padre Padrone
This article is more than 16 years old
Philip French
Mon 24 Sep 2007
No 89 Padre Padrone
Directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
The Taviani brothers, Vittorio (b 1929) and Paolo (b 1931), were born and raised in Tuscany, the sons of a well-off anti-fascist lawyer, and have worked together as film-makers since their student days at Pisa University. As well as adapting Goethe and Pirandello, they've made films set in the revolutionary Italy of the early 19th century and in the last days of the German occupation, and an odd picture called Good Morning Babylon about Italians working on DW Griffith's Intolerance.
Their most important work, however, is Padre Padrone (aka Father, Master), based on a memoir by the academic linguist Gavino Ledda about his harsh upbringing as the son of a psychologically and physically abusive peasant farmer in postwar Sardinia, and how he came to create his own life. Taken out of school aged six, Gavino is forced to take care of the family's sheep in the mountains and at the age of 20 is illiterate. Then family circumstances force him to join the army. There he drops his local dialect, learns to read and write and is inspired to go to university and make a forcible break with an oppressive patriarchal tradition.
It is a gritty realistic story told in a stylised, impressionistic, at times Brechtian manner, with two actors playing Gavino at six (Fabrizio Forte, below) and 20, a brilliantly unsympathetic but understanding performance from Omero Antonutti as the father, and Ledda himself topping and tailing the picture. The film is full of vivid, incisive incident and powerful metaphors, and though affirmative it's devoid of sentimentality or triumphalism.
Padre Padrone received the Palme d'Or at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival and it is widely believed that the president of the jury, Roberto Rossellini, expended so much energy in defying the festival's directorate (who wanted the award to go to Carlo Ponti's A Special Day) and persuading his jury that it brought on his fatal heart attack days later. However, Pauline Kael, who was on the jury and thought it a 'near-great movie', wrote after Rossellini's death that 'there was no question among members of the jury that it had to win the Golden Palm'.
Next week: Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Read the archive at observer.co.u/dvdclub
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