‘Padre Padrone’ or — Shepherd Tones?
“Is it okay for me to be laughing at this?” I asked myself as I watched Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s ‘Padre Padrone’ (1977) last night as I wasn’t quite sure if any of the harrowing scenes I was witnessing were meant to be potentially funny, but when it cut to a group of boys fucking some chickens I realised it was probably fine to allow myself the odd chuckle.
And it’s just as well there’s some humour darkly lurking here because this is one relentlessly brutal movie where a six year old child is forcibly dragged out of school by his abusive father to tend the family’s sheep in the Sardinian mountains. Based on Gavino Ledda’s autobiographical novel we observe the poor sod as he transforms himself from an illiterate shepherd to a professor of linguistics. It’s a tale about the transfiguring effect of language, education and culture.
The Taviani’s make it crystal clear from the start they’re not going to present us with the lie that what we are seeing is reality as the film opens with the real life, adult Gavino passing to the actor playing his father (Omero Antonutti) the stick he will use to beat his son, and as this object passes from “reality” into the realm of re-enactment so we, too, are transported with it.
It’s this constant reminder that we are watching a movie that not only sucks us further in but also prevents ‘Padre Padrone’ from becoming unbearably depressing or a litany of poverty, and the Taviani’s go about this by using several creative devices, most notably through their sophisticated use of music and sound.
There’s a scene where a teenage Gavino is entranced by the music two wandering entertainers are playing on an accordion so he buys the instrument from them for the cost of two lambs only to be furious with frustration when he realises he can’t conjure the same beautiful sounds they could. A few minutes later we see Gavino sitting on a rock tentatively playing the popular tune he’d previously heard yet because he hasn’t fully mastered it we hear him exploring, searching and testing the melodic line and, in the process, creating new phrases that are uniquely his (he’ll later do the same with words). It’s now no longer simply music we’re hearing but the sound of his questing knowledge slowly expanding.
Then, from another hill, comes the sound of another shepherd’s flute responding, the two instruments now interacting and wordlessly exchanging pertinent information, so what we are hearing is the organic repurposing of culture for utilitarian means. Elsewhere sounds and voices are layered, disconnected from their sources or “imagined” allowing us to freely enter private psychological spaces with ease.
As Gavino matures and gradually gains independence his father can feel his control slipping, although it’s not just his son (and thus the target of his limited authority) he is losing but also his way of life as the modern world inexorably encroaches (some transformations we have to struggle for; other forms of change are unstoppable). So this is not just about a father and son but also tradition vs. modernity, the regional vs. the national, fixed rootedness vs. the mobile.
Also, despite the specificity of landscape and setting (rural Sardinia) the themes of power within the family unit are universal and anyone with the terrible misfortune of having grown-up under an abusive parent will immediately recognise the patterns and strategies of cruel domination.
‘Padre Pardone’ is an astonishing experience and the film closes where it began — with the real, adult Gavino passing the stick — and this returning induces a form of devastating catharsis. Although this is not a devastation brought about by cheap melodramatic manipulation but more that a deep sense of indescribable growth has occurred, growth not just in Gavino but also in us from what we’ve just seen. It’s ironically fitting for a film about the importance of language that what it has to say about the human condition is so utterly ineffable. Besides, there’s only so many ways you can describe someone fucking a chicken.
