Happy as Lazzaro, 2018.
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher.
Starring Adriano Tardiolo, Sergi Lopez and Alba Rohrwacher.
SYNOPSIS:
The tale of a meeting between Lazzaro, a young peasant so good that he is often mistaken for simple-minded, and Tancredi, a young nobleman cursed by his imagination. Life in their isolated pastoral village Inviolata is dominated by the terrible Marchesa Alfonsina de Luna, the queen of cigarettes. A loyal bond is sealed when Tancredi asks Lazzaro to help him orchestrate his own kidnapping.
Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Screenplay award, this disorientating metaphysical tragi-comedy from Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders) has pressing social issues on its mind, yet its flecks of brilliance often become muddied in a bloated sea of wishy-washy magical realism and on-the-nose symbolism.
What Happy as Lazzaro has going for it above all else is two-fold; a fantastically intriguing central locale and a compelling lead actor. Unfolding primarily in a small, cut-off village where the denizens haven’t been made aware of technical innovation, the right to education, the illegality of sharecropping or the legal requirement they be paid for their labour, Inviolata is a fascinating relic that, over the course of the movie, collides with the present outside world.
Fresh-faced Adriano Tardiolo meanwhile makes an auspicious debut in the title role, taking what could so easily be an empty blank slate of a character and imbuing him with plenty of agreeable subtleties, while Rorhwacher smartly lingers long on his pensive face. We never learn all that much about Lazzaro as a person, and yet Tardiolo still manages to hold the screen even through some punishingly drawn-out sequences.
It goes without saying that the film is deeply concerned with class struggle in Italy, leaving Inviolata’s citizens stuck in the past while their “masters” flourish. An especially depressing sequence later in the film shows numerous impoverished people bidding for manual labour, low-balling one another and effectively devaluing their own hard graft in the process, at the behest of their prosperous employees of course.
A subplot in which the presiding family’s bored son Tancredi (Luca Chikovani) begs Lazzaro to help him stage his own kidnapping sees lower-class desperation pitted directly against upper-class ennui, and though this side-story sounds like a fine spine for the story entire, it ends up being closer to a red herring when considering the entirety of the narrative.
At the mid-way point the film takes a turn away from the relative “realism” of that first hour, taking on an almost picaresque quality as mated with a whimsical road trip. Unfortunately this is also the juncture at which the already fairly unsubtle class commentary starts to play things just a little too broad and facile. Narrated allegorical stories about saints and wolves clumsily bash the viewer over the head with the film’s message, which tends to clash harshly with some surprisingly silly, broad humour.
It is, at least at times, a wrly funny, winningly surreal effort, though much of the fun and intrigue is also hampered by a stamina-testing 125-minute run-time. Numerous times, Rohrwacher’s tale begins to gain momentum only to trip over itself with ham-fisted obviousness or half-baked, bloated asides. Rohrwacher’s messy ambitions culminate in a groan-worthy ending that feels like pure first-year film school social commentary externalised all-too-visually.
Still, it’s a well-acted, intermittently compelling offering that’s often gorgeous to look at – the vignetted corners of the frame are a nice touch, too – even if Rohrwacher’s reach ultimately exceeds her grasp. There’s probably a pretty decent 90-minute film somewhere in this needlessly sparse, sledgehammer-subtle dramedy.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
