Happy as Lazzaro (2018)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Happy as Lazzaro (2018) – A. Rohrwacher

Very mysterious film from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher that starts out as an homage to Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) about the life of sharecropping peasants in rural Italy but soon turns into something else (Something Else!).  The peasants farm tobacco for an imperious marchesa (and clearly Big Tobacco has some soul-searching to do) but they are always in debt, unable to leave their small village of Inviolata.  Although we start wide with a look at the whole group (women and children most of all), soon Rohrwacher focuses in on Lazzaro (note the Biblical name) who is a humble, kind, perhaps simple-minded, nearly saintly, young man (played by Adriano Tardiolo) who is exploited by others but harbours no animosity toward anyone.  When the Marchesa’s spoiled son befriends him (sort of), Lazzaro lights up and starts to neglect his work in order to serve this heir to the fortune, Tancredi.  Then, there is a very sharp tonal shift to the film and I would be doing you a disservice to disclose it; let me say only that we are asked to contemplate how the economic inequalities of the past might be continued to the present day (what form would they take?).  We might also be asked to ponder WWJD.  But I haven’t quite pieced everything together – surely the themes of the film, explicit or implicit, reverberate far beyond its provincial setting.  Above all, however, it is a delightful film, that manages to blend Olmi’s sad neorealism with some inspired magical realism.  Have a look!