Word: peasant
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Padre, Padrone. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's entrancing film about the loam-to-letters life of a bestselling Sardinian author from humble peasant origins provides the most convincing evidence since Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" of the resilient vitality in Italian cinema, the recent excesses of Fellini, Antonioni, et al. notwithstanding. The Taviani brothers' first film to receive international attention, it features a host of mind-gripping sequences destined to set apart "Padre, Padrone" as one of the most important films to cross the Atlantic in the late 1970s. To name only two: the unforgettable series of shots capturing...
...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...
...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...
ASIDE FROM THE influence of a coterie of egalitarian and moralistic French philosophers and the vestiges of old aristocratic and peasant values that have mediated industrial class conflict, the swing to the left can be attributed in part to the sheer expression of shifting material interests of the French. Ironically, the present majority has hastened its own demise precisely because it has been so successful in stimulating economic expansion and industrialization for the past 20 years. Aided by a government that maintained its legitimacy only as long as the assembly lines were pouring out increasing numbers of cars, clothes...
Editorials hailed him as "a luminous figure, a celebrated Communist leader, a passionate patriot, wise chief of party and state." Broadcasters saluted his "creativity of exceptional value in philosophy, scientific socialism, political economy, history, education, science and culture." In other encomiums, he appeared variously as still "the first peasant among peasants" and a fellow who was "born a peasant, became a worker and is now an intellectual...