Word: patriarchates
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...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...
Jerusalem, 1976: The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church makes his pilgrimage from Moscow to the Russian Orthodox Church in Israel, the sole building in that country allowed to remain in Soviet hands after Israel's 1967 break with the U.S.S.R. Accompanying the Patriarch on his mission, as usual, is a squad of KGB agents bearing communications equipment and funds for local agents. Vladimir Ribakov, the administrative manager of the church in Jerusalem, is the KGB's chief agent in Israel...
...well, to James Tyrone, the actor-patriarch of Long Day's Journey into Night, whom O'Neill modeled on his own father. Con dwells on Wellington's praise of his combat heroics as Tyrone dwells on Edwin Booth's praise of his acting. Both men are united in a fear of the poverty of Ireland and a desire to conceal their peasant origins. Both loathe the modern currents of their times. Melody despises the Jacksonian rabble just as Tyrone reviles such (to him) modern playwrights as Strindberg and Ibsen...