The Sum of the Parts...

WHILE CERTAIN RISKS attend any attempt to read into a single sequence the essence of a feature-length film, one particular scene in Padre, Padrone (Italian for My Father, My Master) goes a long way towards capturing the purpose and theme of this film that dazzled the critics at last year's Cannes Film Festival. A portrait-type shot encompasses the entire family of a Sardinian peasant, Efisio Ledda (Omero Antonutti), seated in the waiting room of a local bank. Compelled to sell his recently inherited farmland in the face of low olive prices and a disastrous winter, the paterfamilias informs his two sons and two daughters of the plans he has drawn up for each of them--marriage, working for the family, and the like--while he awaits his appointment with a bank official. Efisio Ledda singles out his oldest son for special treatment, informing the 20-year-old Gavino (Saverio Marconi) that he should enlist in the army for training as a radio technician. When his wife brings up Gavino's illiteracy, Efisio dismisses her misgivings and assures her that their eldest will learn quickly. He then quizzes Gavino on multiplication tables, greeting his son's off-the-mark guesses with a palm planted squarely on Gavino's right cheeck and shouts of "Ignoramus!" Gavino's blue eyes burn with an all-too-familiar rage, but when his father is called, Gavino and his family dutifully follow into another room. But we can see in his eyes that Gavino Ledda has resolved never again to submit to the open palm or branch-switch wielded by his father.

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Padre, Padrone presents an unflinching look at the true story of Gavino Ledda's very personal struggle to overcome the domination of the intractable patriarch who denied him any opportunity for an education--a struggle which results in his becoming a linguist and bestselling author. So much for the basic plot. But this triumphant movie, the first internationally acclaimed Taviani brothers film, can be approached on two other levels--one structural, the other more stylistic. In one sense, Padre, Padrone develops within a movie-as-book format; based on Ledda's autobiography, the film's three-part, linear structure reminds one of a novel chronologically tracing the ascent of its protagonist. Indeed, the script's crisp, taut dialogues often resemble the verbal sparseness of some contemporary fiction.

ON ANOTHER LEVEL, Padre, Padrone is an earthy chronicle of an event. The directors never romanticize anything or anybody, least of all the virtues of peasant life in the hinterlands. If anything, the Taviani brothers flirt with the danger of caricaturing the figure of Efisio Ledda, a self-conscious Sardinian rebuke to the Tolstoyan idealization of the muzhik. And it is the very bluntness of the portrayal of the patriarch's tyranny that reveals the directors' background in documentaries. The father's capacity for sadistic fury knows no bounds in disciplining his eldest son: Efisio is a petty and mean-hearted fellow, and the Tavianis never let us forget it.

Lest the movie's title mislead us, Padre, Padrone is above all else the story of Gavino Ledda and his singular determination to acquire ever-deepening levels of knowledge and understanding, despite some very formidable obstacles. The opening scene loses no time in explaining why the cards will be stacked against Gavino for the better part of his life. Storming into Gavino's grammar school classroom, shepherd's staff in hand, Efisio demands custody of his son. He tells Gavino's awestruck teacher that the boy is more urgently needed in the fields with the family flock than behind a desk with a book, summing up his view of education by declaring, "There's no such thing as compulsory education; only poverty is compulsory." Hardly the conventional childhood of a man of belles lettres.

The remainder of the film's initial phase deals with the child Gavino's harsh lessons in shepherding and the consequent stunting of his mental and spiritual growth. Minor instances of mischief and sloth are met with the most brutal punishments (one of which renders the young Gavino unconscious). Only the color-rich landscapes captured by Mario Masini's cinematography provide relief from the seemingly ceaseless beatings.

PADRE, PADRONE then moves to the next stage of the narrative, picking up Gavino's story in his twentieth year. As implausible as it may seem, the son apparently discovers for the first time the possibility of alternatives to his shepherd's lot when he hears a Strauss waltz coming from the accordion of two minstrels on their way to a local fair. Gavino's self-education begins with his mastery of the accordion and proceeds apace, although he does comply with his father's orders by going off to the mainland to join the army. In the army he learns to read and write in Italian and acquires the desired training as a radio technician.

The inevitable then happens: a literate and appreciably more independent Gavino leaves the army and returns to Sardinia to pursue his studies at the local university, much to his father's dismay. At first, Gavino agrees to help out with the family farm while he attends college, but when the daily chores begin to interfere with his studies, he elects to concentrate exclusively on his books. The patriarch tries to reinstate his old tyranny but encounters unprecedented resistance and finally rebellion from Gavino, who forsakes the family hearth. Clearly, blood alone has long ago lost its meaning to this angry young man.

Many of the pleasures of Padre, Padrone come from the Tavianis' imaginative use of classic gimmicks to punctuate Gavino's story. One such ploy uses the author Ledda himself to introduce the movie--he hands a shepherd's staff to the actor portraying his father--and to deliver the epilogue to his own story. Another device comes when the young Gavino (Fabrizio Forte) curses a goat for repeatedly defecating into his milk pail--and the animal responds in a surly feminine voice.

Unlike many of his colleagues working for more flamboyant directors in the Italian film industry, cinematographer Masini avoids using flashy camera angles and other distracting legerdemain with the lens. Masini instead unobtrusively records the countryside, focusing on the lush greenery of a Sardinian forest or the evanescent ambers of a pasture at dawn. And at several points in the film, Masini is content to allow events to speak for themselves, permitting the actors to move in and out of the picture while the camera remains fixed in one place. In this way the cinematographer quietly succeeds in imbuing the visual dimension of Padre, Padrone with the same eloquent austerity of style that marks the Tavianis' script.

THE ONLY MAJOR problem with this stirring masterpiece is the Tavinis' occasionally heavy-handed use of symbolism to hammer home a point. During the funeral procession for a slain Mafioso, pall-bearer Gavino fantasizes a statue of his father in place of the sculpted saint perched atop the coffin. And if that does not constitute laying it on with a trowel, consider this: before settling down to the business of lovemaking, a young man persuades his partner to smoke his cigar with the ash end in her mouth. A hint of things to come, perhaps?

Padre, Padrone never significantly deviates from its main purpose of probing the stormy relationship of Gavino and his provincial father, and it is the very centrality of this patriarch/eldest son theme that accounts for the power and merciless tension of the movie. Little is learned about Gavino's specific intellectual ambitions, much less about his love life (which, juding from the film itself, would appear to border on the nonexistent). The Tavianis are, in the end, obsessed, with one goal--to somehow convey the intensity of Gavino's determination to escape his imposed ignorance, and to document the extreme measures to which this unswerving resolve drives him. Given this objective, Padre, Padrone emerges as a stunning achievement. Ultimately, Gavino Ledda's character--not to mention his environment--is never fully examined, but this is no cause for regret or second-guessing. For once, at least, slighting the whole for an isolated part has proven wise.