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
