Word: sardinians
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...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...
...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...
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...
...movie is an adaptation of a remarkable autobiography by Gavino Ledda, a poor Sardinian shepherd's son who grew up to become an accomplished linguist. Ledda, now in his mid-30s, spent his formative years in almost total isolation and ignorance. Yanked out of school at age six by his tyrannical father, he lived alone in the fields and tended his family's flock until he turned 20. Only when he escaped to the Italian army did he discover the pleasures of literacy, industrialized civilization and social intercourse. In Padre Padrone (English title: My Father, My Master...
...mediocre student, but he had a good mind." The young Enrico was a voracious reader who spent much time in his Uncle Ettorino's library; it was there that, among other things, he discovered Karl Marx. His family also had a radical tradition; the Berlinguers, like many other Sardinian landowners, had been squeezed by industrialization and became ardent progressives as a result. Continuing the tradition, Enrico and Younger Brother Giovanni, now 51 and a Communist Deputy, haunted a Sassari cafe favored by old-line Communist and Socialist workers, playing an Italian version of poker called "Il Ramino" with them...