“Come then, dear father, clasp my neck: I will carry you on my shoulders: that task won’t weigh on me. Whatever may happen, it will be for us both, the same shared risk, and the same salvation."
I wish I had a better film to use my favourite quote from the Aeneid for, but I felt so compelled to share it here. That's from the end of Book 2, by the way, when Aeneas carries his father out of the ruins of Troy.
Padre Padrone feels like an anti-Aeneid in a lot of ways. It is about the destruction of familial bonds, not the strengthening of them. It's about how fathers and sons might not connect and support each other. Where the Aeneid is about the infinite ways a father can help a son (and vice versa), even in death, Padre Padrone is about all the ways the two can miscommunicate and cause hurt.
It's a bittersweet story with very heavy-handed themes and messages that didn't work for me. The farmland beauty wore off after thirty minutes and the film as a whole was overlong. I thought it had some interesting things to say about families and father-son relationships, but it didn't completely satisfy me. It was watchable and might affect someone else more than it did me! I love that Rossellini said "This film is a masterpiece and I will die on this hill" and then he did.
Maybe I just used this Aeneid quote because Gavino educated himself with Virgil? Will have to find a better father-son movie to reuse it.
“Come then, dear father, clasp my neck: I will carry you on my shoulders: that task won’t weigh on me. Whatever may happen, it will be for us both, the same shared risk, and the same salvation."
I wish I had a better film to use my favourite quote from the Aeneid for, but I felt so compelled to share it here. That's from the end of Book 2, by the way, when Aeneas carries his father out of the ruins of Troy.
Padre Padrone feels like an anti-Aeneid in a lot of ways. It is about the destruction of familial bonds, not the strengthening of them. It's about how fathers and sons might not connect and support each other. Where the Aeneid is about the infinite ways a father can help a son (and vice versa), even in death, Padre Padrone is about all the ways the two can miscommunicate and cause hurt.
It's a bittersweet story with very heavy-handed themes and messages that didn't work for me. The farmland beauty wore off after thirty minutes and the film as a whole was overlong. I thought it had some interesting things to say about families and father-son relationships, but it didn't completely satisfy me. It was watchable and might affect someone else more than it did me! I love that Rossellini said "This film is a masterpiece and I will die on this hill" and then he did.
Maybe I just used this Aeneid quote because Gavino educated himself with Virgil? Will have to find a better father-son movie to reuse it.
