Film review

  • Padre Padrone

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (1977)

    When Paolo Taviani’s Leonora Addio was screened at the 2022 London Film Festival, a BFI spokesman said they hoped to programme a Taviani brothers retrospective in the coming year:  just a few weeks late, the retrospective has now arrived.  For this viewer, watching the brothers’ best-known film delivered on a much longer-standing good intention – I’ve been meaning and failing to get round to Padre Padrone for nearly half a century.  The Tavianis were also approaching fifty – Vittorio was born in 1929 and Paolo in 1931 – when this film won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 1977 and gave them their international breakthrough.

    Padre Padrone (it’s usually known by its Italian title, which translates literally as ‘Father Master’) is based on an autobiography of the same name by the Sardinian author and linguist Gavino Ledda, who was born in 1938.  As a six-year-old, he was taken out of primary school by his peasant father who decreed that Gavino, as his eldest son, had no time for conventional education and must learn instead to look after the family’s sheep.  The father allowed his illiterate son to resume elementary education only when he was eighteen (as the father had been allowed to do by his father).  Determined to escape his grimly restrictive environment, Ledda tried unsuccessfully to emigrate to the Netherlands before being called up for service in the Italian army in 1958.  He was unable to speak or understand much standard Italian but his language skills improved apace during his military service.  He took middle school exams as an external student, qualified as a military radio operator and returned to Sardinia to combine further academic study with working on the land, although by now increasingly rebellious against his father’s rule.  After obtaining the equivalent of a high-school diploma in 1964, Ledda started university in Rome and graduated in 1969 with a linguistics degree.  He then embarked on an academic career.  He published Padre Padrone in 1975.

    The real Gavino Ledda (introduced as such by a voiceover) is on the screen at the start of the Tavianis’ film.  He’s whittling a stick, which he hands to Omero Antonutti, the actor who will play Gavino’s father, Efisio.  This over-to-you exchange launches the dramatic action:  Efisio and stick enter the classroom where Gavino (Fabrizo Forte) is one of the pupils (all of them boys).  Although Gavino won’t be a pupil much longer, it’s longer, in terms of screen time, than you might expect.  Rather than tersely announcing and carrying out his intentions, Efisio disputes with the class teacher (a young woman) and delivers quite a lengthy speech – railing against the government policy of compulsory schooling, insisting that, for the likes of him and his family, ‘Poverty is all that’s compulsory’.  The Tavianis are known as politically engaged, leftist film-makers, whose influences include Brecht.  The handover of a ‘real’ stick to become a prop at the start of Padre Padrone is a bit of alienation technique.  The thrust of Efisio’s speech in the classroom could be considered Marxist.

    In the narrative that follows, the juxtaposition of styles is unusual:  I think that juxtaposition, rather than integration, is the word – and it’s one reason why I found Padre Padrone such a struggle to watch.  Most scenes in the first part of the film (which runs just under two hours all told) take place in the Sardinian mountains where Gavino is sent to learn shepherding, often in complete human isolation.  The stark landscape is realistic; the Tavianis’ observation of Gavino’s experiences is sometimes nearly documentary.  But the realism is interrupted by bursts of magic realism.  We hear what people are saying inside their heads – and not only people.  Gavino milks a ewe and is dismayed when the yield includes droppings.  The boy angrily tells the ewe, ‘I’ll milk you first then plug with your own shit your mouth, your eyes and ears’.  The sheep replies, ‘You whack me and I crap in the milk – then your father whacks you’.

    The ewe is right about the whacks.  This part of the story is dominated by Efisio’s beatings.  He hits his son – in punishment for either disobedience or incompetence – with his hands, with sticks, even with a snake that Efisio has just killed.  Knowing in advance the son would suffer repeatedly at the hands of the father, I expected to find this phase of Gavino’s education hard going – especially as I guessed that animals used in the filming would also be having a tough time.  In fact, it turns out to be less difficult seeing a sheep’s throat cut (you accept this as everyday life/death in the rustic setting) than to watch Gavino wrenching at the crapping ewe, who presumably survived the experience.  It’s a relief for all concerned that the camerawork implies, rather than shows explicitly, another young peasant having sex with his mule and shepherd boys masturbating with the help of a chicken.  These sequences – followed by one in which Efisio and his wife (Marcella Michelangeli) abruptly prepare to couple – are accompanied on the soundtrack by frantic, frustrated breathing.  It was once the hero had grown into a young man (Saverio Marconi) that I became frustrated with Padre Padrone.

    I get that the film is, as Ryan Gilbey described it (in the Guardian‘s ‘My Favourite Cannes Winner’ series, in 2015), ‘about the mental poverty that arises from a paucity of language, and the relationship it has to physical poverty.  Music, from traditional folk songs to Mozart and Strauss, provides oxygen in Gavino’s airless young life.  But words emancipate him’.  For me, they don’t emancipate him enough.  In the army, he’s socially isolated to a degree that seems implausible even allowing for the verbal constraints that result from speaking only Sardinian – his sole contact is with fellow trainee Cesare (Nanno Moretti), who helps Gavino learn Italian.  (Although in only his mid-twenties, Nanno Moretti had already directed his first feature film when he appeared in Padre Padrone.)  In view of his already strong antipathy to his father, it’s puzzling (and seems masochistic) that Gavino – now wearing a stylish grey suit – returns to his family in the village of Soligo once his academic studies are getting underway.  He has always got on better with his mother and siblings than with his father but Gavino doesn’t say much to them.  It’s only when the real Gavino Ledda reappears in the film’s epilogue that we get an explanation:

    ‘I had to come to write my story – on which this film is based, taking the necessary liberties.  Not really my story but the story of the shepherds.  They, not I, gave life to the book.  With their lives – and I chose to come back for that very reason … Perhaps it’s only a selfish consideration which detains me here.  The fear that far from my cave, my people, my smells I’d be a recluse again …’

    Because Padre Padrone tells an inspiring true story and has such a high reputation, I decided long ago that it must be a masterpiece.  It’s strange to see a film so belatedly and to be so disappointed by it.  (The disappointment is more acute because I was fascinated by the Tavianis’ Caesar Must Die (2012), as well as by Leonora Addio.)  Part of you can’t quite believe you’ve really watched the film:  what you’ve watched, at any rate, isn’t enough to dislodge your well-preserved idée fixe that it’s something special.  As a friend said when I mentioned this, it’s rather as if there’s still a platonic ideal version of Padre Padrone out there somewhere.  NFT1 was showing shadows on the wall of the cave.

    11 February 2024

  • Atonement

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joe Wright (2007)

    I stopped reading Ian McEwan’s fiction years ago:  his self-importance got too much for me, especially when it extended beyond the narrative proper.  Enduring Love (1997) has a couple of appendices, the first purporting to be an academic paper, reprinted from the British Review of Psychiatry, about the medical condition that afflicts one of the novel’s main characters.  The paper is the work of two scientists whose surnames, Wenn and Camia, add up to an anagram of the names of its actual author, bowling us over with his scientific literacy and cunning.  The ballyhoo surrounding the publication of Saturday (2005), whose protagonist is a neurosurgeon, majored on McEwan’s lengthy eye-witness research in the operating theatre at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.  That novel’s timeframe spans a single day – 15 February 2003, the date of the largest public demonstration in British history, against the prospective invasion of Iraq.  Eight years later, McEwan told Channel 4 News that ‘prior to the 2003 invasion he had hoped to be able to seek an audience with Tony Blair to persuade him not to go ahead with the war’ (Wikipedia).  Yes, if that meeting had happened it would have made all the difference – though shouldn’t it have been Tony Blair seeking an audience with Ian McEwan?

    Among the four McEwan novel(la)s I did read, Atonement was much better than the two above-mentioned and On Chesil Beach.  Each of Atonement’s three main parts is written in the third person; a ‘Postscript’, in the first person, reveals that Briony Tallis, one of the principals in the preceding story, is actually the author of all three of its parts.  That revelation causes the novel to dwindle rather – into a more academic exercise about the business of writing fiction, the use of unreliable narrators and so on.  Even so, the twist-in-the-tail is more than clever:  when Briony admits she has not been telling the whole truth, the reader really knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of unreliable narration – on McEwan’s part, as well as Briony’s.  On the face of it, Christopher Hampton’s screenplay for Joe Wright’s film of Atonement is faithful to the novel.  It begins with events at an English country house in the mid-1930s, culminating in the perhaps wilfully mistaken testimony of the young-teenage Briony (Saoirse Ronan) that sends an innocent man to prison.  It continues into World War II, when the innocent man, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), is fighting for the British army in the Battle of France and Briony’s elder sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley), who loves Robbie and is loved by him, is a nurse; and into the early post-war years, as Briony (now Romola Garai) tries and fails to ‘atone’ for her teenage error.  It ends with the elderly Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) giving a television interview about her autobiographical novel ‘Atonement’, in which she makes clear that novel’s departures from what actually happened in her life and to Robbie and Cecilia.  As a scenarist, Christopher Hampton is much superior to Ian McEwan (whose screenplays for later film versions of two of his books – On Chesil Beach and The Children Act, both released in 2017 – were ridiculous) but Hampton had an insoluble problem on his hands.  The film of Atonement can’t be faithful to its source material in reproducing the significance of the concluding reveal because Briony can’t meaningfully be, as she could be on the printed page, responsible for the narrative’s earlier parts.

    This weakness – in terms of both the lack of immediate impact of Briony’s revelation on screen and what difference it makes to the audience’s retrospective view of preceding events – is far from Atonement‘s only one.  Other defects are more blatant.  The film’s air of self-approval might seem a fitting tribute to McEwan (who was one of its executive producers) but, with Joe Wright at the helm, the virtuosity is less sophisticated – Wright always has an eye on the box office.  For as long as the action is happening at the Tallis family pile, he pushes the sunlit luxury of the period settings for all they’re worth; once country-house costume drama turns into wartime romance, he does the same with that.  Dario Marianelli’s music duly makes emphatically clear the fraught emotions simmering behind the sunshine before morphing into love-story-for-the-ages mode.  Wright’s approach was vindicated – and not just because Atonement, which cost $30m to make, took $131m (Wikipedia figures in February 2024).  The film’s most conspicuously flamboyant elements were also among its most admired.  Marianelli’s insistent score won Atonement its only Oscar.  The outstanding highlight, for many, is DP Seamus McGarvey’s five-minute tracking shot along the sea front at Dunkirk.  Robbie, separated from his army unit, makes his way there on foot, observing the terrible carnage on the beach – and more.  These five minutes are pure showing off by Joe Wright.  One’s sense of the Dunkirk sequence as a performance is reinforced especially by a group of British soldiers on the prom singing ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’:  once they get to the end of the last verse, the soldiers go back to the start of the first verse – as if on a loop.

    As the doubly doomed romantic leads, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy are unsatisfying in different ways.  In the first part, Knightley’s rat-a-tat delivery and temperamental brittleness are effective enough.  Later on, her portrait of Cecilia feels hollow though she’s hardly helped by Wright’s taste for kitschy overkill.  As Cecilia tends a mortally wounded French soldier (a cameo from Jérémie Renier), a single teardrop rolls down his cheek, to the accompaniment not of Dario Marianelli but of Claude Debussy (Clair de lune, of course) – after all, the soldier is French … An actress more capable of finding emotional truth than Keira Knightley would struggle to authenticate Cecilia’s reaction to this.  James McAvoy is less comfortable than his co-star with an RP English accent.  That might seem right:  although Robbie, like Cecilia, has recently graduated from Cambridge, he’s the son of the Tallises’ housekeeper (Brenda Blethyn) and his higher education was paid for by Cecilia’s father.  But McAvoy gives the impression of disguising his own Scottish accent rather than his character’s humble origins.  When he expresses emotion, the posh voice slips a bit; when he concentrates on getting the voice right, his line readings tend to lose expression.  Despite this, McAvoy, as usual, acts intelligently and conscientiously.  Also as usual, he lacks dynamism. 

    There are lots of other well-known – or soon to be well-known – faces on the screen – Benedict Cumberbatch (as the real culprit in the sexual assault for which Robbie takes the rap), Juno Temple (as Briony’s older cousin, the victim of the assault), Harriet Walter (the Tallis family matriarch), Gina McKee (bizarrely miscast as a no-nonsense nursing sister), Daniel Mays (a fellow soldier in Robbie’s unit).  The acting is really elevated, though, only by the three ages of Briony.  In only her second film role, Saoirse Ronan is a wonder – emotionally precise, effortlessly eccentric, utterly natural.  Ronan’s performance in effect sets Romola Garai a follow-that challenge that Garai meets very well, particularly in capturing the young adult Briony’s ambivalence.  Vanessa Redgrave has much less screen time but great presence as the elderly, terminally ill Briony.  As she speaks to her briefly glimpsed TV interviewer (played by Anthony Minghella, who died only a few months after the release of Atonement), Briony faces the camera.  She explains that her post-war meeting with Robbie and Cecilia never happened:  he died from his wounds at Dunkirk; later in 1940, Cecilia was among the fatalities when a bomb hit Balham tube station, causing a fractured water main to flood the station and drown civilians using it as an air raid shelter.  Speaking to camera in a calm, purposeful voice, Redgrave is compelling; it’s a bad mistake to interrupt her with flashbacks to Robbie’s and Cecilia’s deaths.  Wright’s spectacular, bombastic flooding of the tube station is phony enough to eclipse any of the fictional inventions that Briony is admitting.

    Sally and I saw Atonement in the cinema on its original release.  Watching it again now on television was a reminder not just of the mostly over-enthusiastic reception of the film back in 2007 but also of the excited predictions made then, in the British media at least, for the bright young stars involved, on both sides of the camera.  Joe Wright was in only his mid-thirties, James McAvoy in his mid-twenties and Keira Knightley just twenty-one; Saoirse Ronan was twelve.  In the years since, none of these four has sunk without trace but only one has come to be recognised as a real screen artist – the right one, thank goodness.  If Atonement hadn’t supplied Saoirse Ronan’s breakthrough role something else probably would have, and soon.  You can’t be sure, though.  The film that launched this brilliant actress is, whatever its shortcomings, a film to be grateful for.

    8 February 2024

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