Word: themes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHILE CERTAIN RISKS attend any attempt to read into a single sequence the essence of a 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...
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...
...information office in Oslo followed the same theme last year, declaring, "There is no new policy by the PLO to recognize Israel...The declared program of the PLO is to bring about the destruction of the Zionist entity of Israel...
...children are born to accept their parents' dictums so easily, and Coles vividly portrays the experiences of children who are taught the second theme of their privileged lives, paternalism. Hence the example of Larry, the young son of a grower who persists in asking his father, at the age of six, why there are children his age working in the fields, helping their parents, when he himself was doing nothing. His feelings take on a stronger idealistic tone at 11, when he writes an essay in school explaining why he is lucky and "unlucky" and how he does not want...
...give his idea any weight, and what little there is is far too flimsy to bear the tensions Mamet imposes. A tacked-on existential conclusion to a mundane drama about the values of the urban lower class is just too much of a contrast. Had Mamet stuck to one theme or another, the conclusion might have made more sense...