Word: gavino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...