Wild Child

By Frank Rich

PADRE PADRONE

Directed and Written by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani

It is a weird but persistent paradox: some brilliant movies are sheer torture to sit through. Such is the case with Padre Padrone, the Italian television film that last spring became the first movie ever to win both the grand prize and the international critics' prize at the Cannes Festival. Padre Padrone has undeniable merits; it tells a fascinating true-life story in an innovative style. Yet somehow it never makes us care passionately about its people or its subject. Though there is reason to believe that this film will influence other films, many moviegoers may forget Padre Padrone as soon as they leave the theater.

The 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), we see how Ledda overcame his punishing childhood and the cultural heritage of centuries to seize a life of intellectual endeavor. To their credit, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the brothers who directed the film, do not sentimentalize material that could easily collapse into bathos.

Padre Padrone unfolds in brief and often brutal bursts of drama that are more reminiscent of Godard movies than of anthropological documentaries; the film's unsettling rhythm is meant to echo the primitive manners of the society it describes. Even more startling is the Tavianis' extravagant use of sound to intensify and comment upon the film's pivotal incidents. When, for instance, the hero first experiences sex (in the form of bestiality), the panting of a chorus of unseen copulators overwhelms the action. Later, a moment of incongruous accordion music smashes the film's pastoral hush to prefigure Ledda's liberation from the enforced silence of his youth. While the film is vibrantly photographed and generally well acted (notably by Omero Antonutti as the father and Fabrizio Forte as the young Ledda), the sound track is the true star.

The Tavianis' film-making techniques remain daring throughout, but Padre Padrone's style finally proves to be not only the movie's principal virtue but its undoing. The directors are too coldly rigorous in their efforts to remain aloof from the emotional content of their story: they place so large an intellectual distance between us and the characters that the gap becomes unbridgeable. That is why we admire Padre Padrone without being engaged by it, and care more about the filmmakers' achievements than we do about what happens to the hero. Like other such oddities as Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, Padre Padrone is a dead movie whose novel cinematic vocabulary will survive the corpse.

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