Cinema
Peasantry
Clancy Sigal
Padre Padrone (Camden Plaza) Silence is the star of Padre Padrone (X certificate). It rings like the bells of death over the bleak Sardinian hills where a little shepherd boy has been exiled by his peasant father to tend the family's flock. It fills the soul of the lonely child, who can neither read nor write, with an almost unspeakable terror; for more than ten solitary years it dulls him into a trance of stupidity. Rural silence, which most of us traffic-blasted city folk take as a rare blessing, is for the isolated and brutalised boy the greatest curse of his life.
Padre Padrone — literally, my father, my master — is a low-budget Italian-made film based on an autobiography by Gavino Ledda who rebelled against his tyrannical father at twenty, joined the mainland army Which liberated him by training him in words, and became a professor of linguistics, Ledda himself, now in his thirties, appears briefly at the beginning and end of a Picture otherwise perfomed by actors. It is a starkly anti-pastoral, fictionalised documentary which — apart from its cruelly uncompromising view of peasant life — succeeds in reaching down deeply into our most elemental fears of isolation and abandonment, into formless mists of childhood loneliness.
Padre Padrone was made by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani for Italian TV and won the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Festival. It Is .filled with stunning images, with surprising and even shocking mixes of visual beauty and savage sounds. Especially telling is the use of screaming Sardinian chants Which suddenly break into the sound track at unexpected moments. Employed sparely, these aural explosions of dirge and music dramatically heighten the deafening, deadening solitude which reduced Gavino to virtual autism. (We see him endlessly rock in g back and forth in a deep hillside hole he dug for himself.) Even after he learned to read, he felt constantly threatened by regression to this sub-human state. Anyone who has ever been badly frustrated by their own clumsy ignorance, who has ever felt the suffocating tidal waves of mental blankness, will surely be moved by the scene where Gavino, back from the army for a confrontation with his father, senses the sleep of stupidity coming on him again and has to shake himself almost epileptically out of it.
My problems with this powerful and extraordinary movie begin with its skill. I know that a critic should not be influenced by the opinions of others, but the fact is that I was 'set' to see Padre Padrone as serious film art by its advance publicity, much of it justified. Yet every now and then I could not repress a certain irreverent doubt about how the Taviani brothers, passionate disciples of Rossellini's neo-realism techniques, pile on the agony. For example, there is a longish sequence which has the psychotically lonely Gavino fornicating with a goat which — you must pardon my continuing to be graphic — has just shat into a pail of milk he was getting from it. The camera, pulling back into long shot, then pans over the countryside where other shepherd boys his age, equally oppressed by their poverty-conditioned parents, are energetically screwing mules, chickens, etc. The soundtrack is full of the orgiastic breathing of these bestial, depressed children. From a high angle the camera then hovers over the village where we have previously seep the fathers take their wives in similar animal-like fashion, and the whole sequence builds to .a climax of rutting cacophony done almost entirely with sounds.
In context, this is less shocking than my description might suggest. What bothered me was not the obscenity but its potential for unwanted laughs. Way back in TV's infancy, 1950s America roared at the satires on Italian neo-realism staged by comics like Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca; more recently. Woody Allen did something of the sort in a fantasy sequence in Play It Again, Sam. It's possible that, if you momentarily edge out from under the Tavianis' undeniable spell, you may recall such parodies at all the wrong times.
My other twinge comes from a longstanding discomfort I've felt with sophisticated urban film-makers who invade 'primitive' cultures, such as the Sardinian shepherding one undoubtedly is. Or is it? From time to time I wondered if the Tavianis might be doing to the bucolic Sards what so many directors do to country cousins in American films like Deliverance and Jackson County Jail: grossly oversimplify and exaggerate southerners' redneck, Snopes-like cretinism for dramatic purposes. (We know from an interview that the Tavianis tampered with Ledda's book to the extent of softening the author's hatred of his father in order to bring his feelings into line with their Marxist notions of pity for the oppressor-as-oppressed and with their own filial attitudes to their own father who had just died).
The Sardinians are an ancient, complex culture; they may have their own reasons for doing what they do other than just the grinding poverty which is the directors' possibly simplistic explanation for the peasants' unremitting cruelty to one another. I wish that the Tavianis' sensibility, focused on Gavino's struggle for literacy but which freely uses Sardinian customs and songs, had been a little more flexible with regard to the human animals of the field we are shown. Is no Sardinian ever tender, ever loving, ever amused?
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