Padre Padrone (1977)

Very disappointing...

Really Surprised!

Best movie ever!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Already in the beginning the viewers are told that this is the story of a linguist who wrote a book. The story starts, then, with a father, a shepherd, as he takes his little son out of the classroom to the mountains to help guard the area and the flocks of sheep. When other boys laugh, the father tells them their day will come too, and it does. In the poor Sardinia, the life of boys is that of men. If they rebel or fail, their fathers exercise violence against them. A Poor kid's comfort: the father promises Gavino that when he'd be 20, he'd be free to go to elementary school. Humor and something of a naive charm are sparkled along the film, but the roughness of this life comes through and through. Eventually, the time for elementary school arrives, and Gavino takes full advantage of it. Still, you stay in doubt if he will ever be really free from the spirit and the mentality of his father.

Seeing this film, reminded me of the typical situation of living outside the cities and in the fields.Gavino Ledda, lived a difficult life, which, the worst part, I think, was being isolated and with no contact from the outside of his sardinian life.I've seen that this movie is a polemic one towards being a good film or being a piece of trash, I'd go with the first one. I think that is a good film, making an adaptation of a book is always difficult, and the taviani brothers, did it succesfuly, ok, it is not a masterpiece either. but it's not a bad film, it applies the best it could to the low-budget they had. The Feat comes with the fact that it won the Palm D'Or in Cannes in 1977, and sometimes you might expect a piece of art, comparing it to the 'Tree of Wooden Clogs' that won the next Palm D'Or in 1978, Padre Padrone stands weak, but still I think it's a good movie, I own it, and sometimes watch again to take on some technichal details. If you have the chance see it, I can assure you that even if you don't like it, you won't consider it such a waste of time.

This film was laughably bad. The adults in the film are all brutish savages, and the plot line was non-existent. Apparently, a kid is pulled out of school to work for his father as a sheep herder, and suffers abuse at the hands of the man (who, judging from the film, couldn't have had an IQ much higher than 3). The next thing you know, the kid is about 18 and is still trying to figure out a way to run off. Horribly acted and, unlike movies of the same genre (Acla) this film was so pathetically scripted that you couldn't even care about the characters. A complete and utter zero.If you're looking for a "Mystery Science Theater" type experience where you can sit around with some of your buds and laugh at a truly horrible movie, then 'Padre Padrone' is the one for you!

This move was pure agony to watch and totally devoid of any redeeming entertainment value at all. The endless scenes of extreme child abuse, masturbation and bestiality made this an experience that will scare me for life. A root canal would be preferable entertainment. Anyone who enjoys this movie has to be sick.My expectation was a story about a boy overcoming child abuse to become a successful writer. Only about 10 minutes is spent on the `overcoming' with the rest of the time obsessed on the agony. This could have been a great movie if it focused on the metamorphosis of an abused, illiterate Shepard into a literate professor and writer.My personal regret is that I fell for the `Cannes Golden Palm' label again. `Art is in the eye of the beholder' and this beholder sees very little artistic value in this movie. This movie had awful sound, poor cinematography, bad set decoration and horrible musical score. It is hard to imagine this movie being better than some of the other movies of this year like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Equus, The Goodbye Girl and Annie Hall. Cannes went way out of the way to avoid a good movie for their award. My observation is that Cannes is a bunch of snobs who never give anything to any movie that can be remotely called entertaining.