El Sur (Victor Erice, 1983)

Omero Antonutti and Sonsoles Aranguren in El Sur

Cast: Omero Antonutti, Sonsoles Aranguren, Icíar Bollaín, Lola Cardona, Rafaela Aparicio, Aurore Clément, Maria Caro, Francisco Merino, José Vivó, Germaine Montero. Screenplay: Victor Erice, based on a story by Adelaida García Morales. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Antonio Belizón. Film editing: Pablo G. del Amo. Music: Enric Granados. 

The ending of El Sur feels right: After her father's suicide, Estrella (Icíar Bollaín) falls ills and to recover goes to stay with her grandmother in el sur, the southern Spain that she has never seen, from which her father exiled himself because his Republican sympathies were at odds with the Nationalism of his father during the Spanish Civil War. We've seen how Estrella has imagined the South as warmly antithetical to the often chilly and sometimes bleak environs of Madrid where she and her parents live. She is also tantalized by the mysterious past of her father (Omero Antonutti), who once loved a woman who had a brief film career under the name Irene Rios (Aurore Clément), and who made a phone call to a number in the South shortly before he killed himself. Do we need to follow Estrella to the South to know that other mysteries will open themselves to her? And yet writer-director Victor Erice wanted to do so: He planned another 90 minutes to El Sur that would show us what Estrella did and found there, but was stymied by his producer's insistence that there was no money to film it. The remarkable thing is that the film as stands feels complete. What feels right about the ending of the film that we now have is that it's a part of what we know about Estrella: her solitary pursuit of things of mysterious things. This is a film about awakening and illumination: It begins with the dawn's light gradually penetrating the sleeping Estrella's room, and windows play a significant role in creating the film's symbolic texture. The scenes from the movie in which Irene Rios stars provide another kind of window. The most brilliant sequence in El Sur is the final meal Estrella shares with her father in a hotel dining room illuminated by high windows. She and her father are the only diners in this space, but a wedding party is taking place in an adjacent room whose windowed doors are covered by curtains. At one point Estrella goes to the doors and peeks into the room, whose music echoes that played at the party after her first communion, when the younger Estrella (Sonsoles Aranguren), dressed in white "like a bride," danced with her father. El Sur has the wholeness we expect of good films, and though we may wish that Erice had been allowed to give us more, we can be content with what we have. 

Padre Padrone (Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, 1977)

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.  

The Night of the Shooting Stars (Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani, 1982)

 

The Night of the Shooting Stars (Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani, 1982)

Cast: Omero Antonutti, Margarita Lozano, Claudio Bigagli, Miriam Guidelli, Massimo Bonetti, Enrica Maria Modugno, Sabina Vannucchi, Giorgio Naddi. Screenplay: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, Giuliani G. De Negri, Tonino Guerra. Cinematography: Franco Di Giacomo. Production design: Gianni Sbarra. Film editing: Roberto Perpignani. Music: Nicola Piovani.