The idea for Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro Felice) reportedly came to Alice Rohrwacher when remembering an article she had read at school: a story about an aristocrat’s tobacco farm where peasants were still being exploited long after the outlawing of sharecropping in Italy in 1982, until their plight was discovered and the landowner arrested. Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro is a tale of two peoples, landowners and peasants, the former individualists and the latter collective. Newcomer Adriano Tardiolo plays Lazzaro as permanently entranced or bewitched by his surroundings, as if locked in a dream. Beautifully shot on 16mm by Hélène Louvart, this is a sprawling and strange film that narrates a fabulist tale in broad strokes and with an understated audacity, covering its many themes and ideas with a visual simplicity that belongs to paintings before the Renaissance, before notions of perspective, ego and capital.
The film opens with a long shot in the dark and we meet Lazzaro as part of a group of young peasant men preparing to serenade the girl that one of them wants to marry outside a country house. They sing and then are invited in to share a glass of marsala under the light of a single bulb (which moves from room to room depending on the occasion). The first indication that they’re enslaved comes with the information that the engaged couple must ask the landowner Marchesa (Natalia Bruscchi) for permission to be together – but they still sing; their spirits are strong; and they have access to magic. Rohrwacher weaves neorealism and magic realism into her own idiosyncratic vision of the land, of freedom and innocence. The film is threaded through with fables and biblical references, signs and symbols, and the spectator, like the exploited peasants, is rendered illiterate, forced instead to rely on the reading of faces and gestures, nature and its secret forces. Time is marked by the phases of the moon, by harvests, laughter and drinking. The peasants have their joys, but when they gather around a table to have their debts noted by the Marchesa’s ruthless envoy (Natalino Balasso) we are made to understand the relentless cruelty of serfdom, its endless debts and impossible traps. The estate is called, ironically, L’Inviolata, but really it is the peasants who are inviolate, because despite their exploitation by the Marchesa on the land they have a purity; they are ruled by the laws of nature, of wolves and their dangerous potential, rather than debt, capital or their collective yoke – the dark realities of the external world that the second half of the film so skilfully lays out.
Meanwhile, the Marchesa’s house is sterile. Images of tortured saints are hidden under mattresses and stuck inside drawers, revealed to us by the servant girl who knows the secrets of the house – its mystical subtexts. The Marchesa instructs the young girls from the village in morality with a dry, cruel cynicism. Later, she spies on her unpaid peasants from a watchtower. “Human beings are beasts,” she remarks to her louche son Tancredi (YouTube star Luca Chikovani), whose peroxide hair and jeans give him a rockstar affect, as he smokes cigarettes and skulks around the house like a trapped animal. Tancredi befriends the innocent Lazzaro and runs away from home, hiding himself away in the mountain cave that is Lazzaro’s true home. He proposes that they are half-brothers, and offers Lazzaro a gift, a rustic slingshot. Happy as Lazzaro is a biblical parable of rebirth, of goodness, of hope – Lazzaro is David and the world is Goliath. Lazzaro is also the last good man: while Tancredi escapes his mother and the system of control that she embodies, he can’t survive the wild and needs Lazzaro to feed him figs and cigarettes.
Happy as Lazzaro is full of biblical and mythological references, that work together to create rich allegory. In the Bible Lazarus is a symbol of resurrection and faith; here Lazzaro is mute and other-worldly, with a certain strangeness that separates him from the group. This separation is made literal in the second half of the film. When the police arrive to bust the illegal tobacco farm he’s already missing. Like the reluctant slaves in the Exodus story, they are sent away, hesitantly crossing the river to freedom, led by the police (who will later abandon them entirely). Following this, we find the same peasants in an unidentified metropolis, scavenging and living by railroad tracks, transformed and embittered by the brutal landscape, now petty criminals and scavengers. Lazzaro isn’t among them because when searching for Tancredi he falls dramatically from a cliff, and this serves as the cut through which the second half of the film enters; a shift to a new landscape and new temporality. Wakened by a wolf in the valley where he fell, Lazzaro returns to find L’Inviolata an abandoned ruin. Is this a Christian narrative told through a Marxist lens where Lazzaro’s innocence is his happiness? Tancredi – in mythology and lore – is a knight from the First Crusade who fights to conquer Jerusalem; an exiled aristocrat stripped of his estate in Rossini’s opera; a hero betrayed by a lover in Voltaire’s ‘Tancrède’. Here he’s the son of an exploiter who longs for freedom and who, after the ‘fall’ of the estate, disappears along with his dog and a walkman into the metropolis, where he is later found by Lazzaro, whose loyalty and youth remain steadfast.
In The Wonders (2014), Rohrwacher’s previous film, power is the media circus, and the peasants are presented as beekeepers, honey-makers, yet there is no easy glorification of their simplicity in Rohrwacher’s vision. They have the earth, with all its complex realities, and the media is presented a fairy godmother for girls who dream but its spectacle ultimately turns out to be false, a cruel, hollow substitute for magic. When Lazzaro finds his old group, living on the margins of the city where they eat food from plastic packages, he teaches them about the plants growing at the edge of the railway, and they eat together around their makeshift table in their makeshift house. Lazzaro hasn’t lost his wisdom: he retains his nobility while they have become abject and marginal, the decaying furniture from L’Inviolata scattered around them. Following another encounter with Tancredi in which his wife sends them away but demands the cakes that they have brought, it’s made clear that despite their ostensible liberation nothing has changed – aristocrats still eat and peasants starve. The Wonders has similar themes of natural intelligence attempting to survive against an environment of ruthless cynicism, and Happy as Lazzaro develops these ideas further. Lazzaro barely speaks: he’s a cipher, a symbol of something ancient and good. Because he has the ‘scent of a good man’ the wolf that finds him wounded and senseless doesn’t kill him but runs away.
Rohrwacher’s films all seek authenticity in a cynical world where power and exploitation attempt to crush the yearning for joy in her subjects. They are a celebration of kindness and love, freedom and beauty, that exposes the hollow assertions of church, state and law. Rohrwacher’s law is the triumph of the spirit over the hypocrisy of exploitation. She looks for the real mysticism of lore and land, folk songs and fables, traditions unsullied by opportunism and abuse of power, and in this film does so through Lazzaro, an absolute symbol of goodness. Happy As Lazzaro won Best Screenplay this year at Cannes, and although Rohrwacher’s style is more visual and sensual than it is driven by dialogue, this makes sense when considering the skilful way that the film pulls together temporal disjunctures and sudden twists without resorting to heavy-handed narrative devices, creating a broad and complex tapestry of the ancient and modern whose subtlety wins us over despite its impossible leaps of faith.
