Padre Padrone (Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, 1977)
Cast: Omero Antonutti, Saverio Marconi, Marcella Michelangeli, Fabrizio Forte, Marino Cenna, Stanko Molnar, Nanni Moretti, Gavino Ledda. Screenplay: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, based on a book by Gavino Ledda. Cinematography: Marino Masini. Production design: Gianni Sbarra. Film editing: Roberto Perpignani. Music: Egisto Macchi.
Two great themes coalesce in Padre Padrone. One is older than Oedipus, the primal conflict of father and son. The other came to the fore in the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions it spawned; we now call it "social mobility." Poets used to write of flowers "born to blush unseen" and "mute inglorious Milton[s]," the victims of rural isolation, primitive ignorance, societies atrophied in feudal patriarchy. The Tavianis find both themes surviving in rural Sardinia, where Gavino Ledda's father drags him from school at the age of 6 and keeps him in servitude and illiteracy as a shepherd for the next 14 years. Padre Padrone could have been just a feel-good story about Gavino's triumph over his father's sternness and greed -- though the elder Ledda thinks what he's doing is for the son's own good -- but the Tavianis won't let it be just that. Though Gavino, rescued by compulsory military service from isolation and ignorance, becomes a celebrated linguist, an authority on the Sardinian dialect, the actual Gavino Ledda, appearing in a frame story for the dramatized part of the film, lets it be known that he has been permanently marked by his father. The Tavianis also find witty ways of letting the outside world irrupt into the young Gavino's isolation, as when the young shepherd hears an accordion playing and the soundtrack bursts into the overture from Die Fledermaus, a correlative for the world beyond the Sardinian hills. Later, after Gavino has begun to find his vocation but has been forced to return home, the aching beauty of the adagio from Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, to which Gavino is listening, is stifled when the father angrily drowns the radio in the sink. Gavino's feeling of being suppressed by his father finds a correlative when he joins a group of other young men carrying the effigy of a saint to a festival at the church. Hidden underneath the heavy statue, the men plot an escape to be guest-workers in Germany, but the camera pans up to the statue, which has changed to an image of Gavino's father, whose refusal to sign the necessary papers prevents Gavino from fleeing. Padre Padrone was made for Italian TV, and has been restored from 16mm film, so its images are sometimes a little muddy, but it gains real power from its storytelling and from the performances of Omero Antonutti as the father and Saverio Marconi as the grownup Gavino.
