My favourite Cannes winner: Padre Padrone

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/apr/28/my-favourite-cannes-winner-padre-padrone

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Few films, even the greatest ones, are life-changing. It’s just something critics say. But Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan, showing Italy in tatters in the second world war, really did alter the paths taken by two Italian brothers: 17-year-old Paolo Taviani and his 15-year-old brother Vittorio, who saw it in 1946. They made a pledge after leaving the cinema: if they were not shooting films within a decade, they would buy a gun and shoot themselves. Thirty years later, and fully established as directors, they made their masterpiece, Padre Padrone. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1977, as well as the international critics’ prize – the first picture to scoop both awards at the festival. The jury president that year was the man who had inspired them: Roberto Rossellini.

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Padre Padrone, which was made for Italian television, is based on the autobiography by the linguist Gavino Ledda. It details his upbringing in Sardinia at the hands of his father, a brutal peasant farmer, and opens with the real Gavino whittling away at a branch with his knife. The camera pans right to a man approaching a door. It is Omero Antonutti, the actor who will play Gavino’s father. He is about to enter a classroom, from which he will drag his illiterate six-year-old son (Fabrizio Forte) before forcing him to work in the wind-beaten mountains. Gavino hands his screen parent the stick he has been fashioning: “My father was carrying this,” he says. It’s a masterful, Brechtian moment; the baton is passed from reality to cinema.

The brothers have said that “the audience must always know it is watching a film”, and Padre Padrone never lets us forget. We eavesdrop on people’s thoughts, such as the other children in Gavino’s class (“Please God, make my father die. All it takes is a kick from a donkey”). The noise rises to a violent clamour, but we can see that the pupils are all sitting quietly, lips sealed. Milking a recalcitrant goat, Gavino bickers telepathically with the creature. “I will shit in your milk and then your father will hit you,” says the goat. “I am going to keep your arse shut,” the kid snaps back.

That exchange is typical of the picture’s earthiness. The landscape is plain, formidable, never pretty. Sheep-shearers fart brazenly, Blazing Saddles-style. Making a bid for freedom, the 20-year-old Gavino (Saverio Marconi) and his friends blow raspberries at the land. One man pisses in the direction of the sheep he hated herding. Once he joins the army, Gavino builds up his vocabulary (“Chapped … predatory … wild … rural”). Among those teaching him new words is a fellow grunt, played by Nanni Moretti, who would later be a Palme d’Or winner himself, in 2001, for directing The Son’s Room. (He is in competition this year with Mia Madre.) The Tavianis had decided against Moretti being their assistant on Padre Padrone. “I didn’t want an assistant who was already a director in his own right,” said Vittorio. “We were in a pizzeria when I told Nanni this and he cried. I said, ‘Don’t cry. Come and do a cameo role.’ When he arrived on set in Sardinia with a suitcase, he looked like a poor immigrant.”

Padre Padrone is about the mental poverty that arises from a paucity of language, and the relationship it has to physical poverty. Music, from traditional folk songs to Mozart and Strauss, provides oxygen in Gavino’s airless young life. But words emancipate him. The real Gavino appears again at the end, to claim back his story from the film.

Giving the Palme d’Or to Padre Padrone was controversial. Most of the jury apparently wanted Ettore Scola’s A Special Day to win (though one jury member, Pauline Kael, disputes this). “The pressures on Rossellini to reconsider the decision were enormous,” wrote Mira Liehm in her book Passion and Defiance. The director stood firm. It has been suggested that behind-the-scenes arguments contributed to his death from a heart attack five days after returning to Rome from Cannes.

“I was keeping my father company in Cannes,” recalled his daughter, the actor Isabella Rossellini. “He loved Padre Padrone and was very proud that a film made in 16mm for television had won at such an important festival. It was a victory for my father’s ideas about what film should be. He was very involved with social problems and very much for low-budget cinema and reaching the largest number of people through television.”