Lazzaro Felice (2018)

🎬  Alice Rohrwacher⁣

Just like Rohrwacher’s previous films Happy As Lazzaro starts with a dark image as well, I don’t think it’s any coincidence. The image of darkness fading into light feels like an opening of our senses to a new place, to people we haven’t met or heard before, to a new experience.

The setup is very simple, a group of people living as a family work as farm hands in a sharecropping arrangement on a tobacco farm on an estate called Inviolata. Lazzaro, the central character of the film is one of those workers. The introduction to Lazzaro is a long shot of him staring into the void in the darkness, he seems so lost.

But just a few minutes into the film we learn that that’s actually him being himself, a person with no mask, one helps others without asking any questions or judging them, an unadulterated soul about whom you can only hear in fairytales. He doesn’t have anyone as a relation except for his grandmother but he doesn’t long for it either. The sharecropping is an outlawed practice but farm workers don’t even know that, they work for nothing without asking any questions trying to clear their debts.

This makes an interesting analogy, in some ways these workers are no different to Lazzaro, both of them obey and follow every command given to them but what makes them different is that farmworkers don’t have the good soul of Lazzaro, the farm owner exploits these workers, the farm hands in turn exploit Lazzaro (he’s shown doing the bulk of the work), it’s like a cycle, a metaphor to the mechanism of capitalism but look where the cycle stops, it stops with Lazzaro, he doesn’t take advantage of anyone but takes all the burden on himself without even complaining.

T⁣here are some scenes in the film in which people exploit and mock him that is so devastating but the biggest heartbreak of all comes through this very little detailing in dialogue, some of the farmworkers are relaxing near a water source, they hear footsteps of someone approaching through woods, a girl asks “𝘞𝘩𝘰’𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵” for which an another replies “𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘓𝘢𝘻𝘻𝘢𝘳𝘰”, this is one of the many brilliant moments in the film, use of just three words as a dialogue to indicate that most of the workers don’t really care about Lazzaro but that’s what purity and selflessness bring to someone, it’s not only a thankless quality to have but in Lazzaro’s case its a threat as well.

Tancredi, the son of the farm owner after being fed up with his mother for controlling him befriends Lazzaro and fakes his own kidnapping to get some money from his mother as ransom but his mother sees through this act so the random never arrives. Tancredi is alone in the harsh badlands, he needs someone to accompany him so when calls Lazzaro his half brother, Lazzaro stops for a minute and that’s the first time we hear a piece of music that’s not used to establish a landscape or an event in the film but to transport the melancholy of a character, it’s his first time hearing someone calling him by relation and it means something to him and takes it so seriously.

But, unfortunately, he can’t spend more time with Tancredi ‘cause he has to work on the farm but Tancredi doesn’t understand this and says that a half brother doesn’t leave another all alone in this wilderness. Lazzaro after hearing this and being returned from the uphill to the farm goes staring into the void again. This action of him staring into the void is so important in understanding Lazzaro, it happens after the crucial moments in the film and it’s almost like a reflection of him feeling overwhelmed in fact there’s an actual shot which is a reflection of Lazzaro in the water when he’s staring into the void after not being able to accompany whom he thinks as his half brother.

If there’s ever gonna be a list of the most cinematic moments in films of the last decade, I don’t think the list would be complete without the magical genre twist in Happy as Lazzaro, it’s something that’s so magical and reminds you of the real power of cinema. So, Inviolata is now completely abandoned and many years later Lazzaro reunites with Antonia (one of the farmworkers) and her family in the city but he is the same person as they last saw him, the same innocent soul as they last remembered and for Lazzaro nothing is changed as well, he starts looking for his half brother and when Lazzaro eventually finds his half brother by accident Tancredi invites him and Antonia’s family to his estate for a lunch. But when Lazzaro and Antonia’s family arrive at his home, Lazzaro learns that he is not rich but completely broke and the bank is to blame for it.

The next sequence is one of the purest moments in cinema that I have seen, Lazzaro goes staring into the void again and for the first time in the entire film he sheds a tear and that’s not ‘cause Tancredi lied to him but ‘cause Tancredi is actually broke and he feels so sorry for him.

The ending to the film more than being magical is so devastating, it’s almost like a statement stating that a man who is so pure, so selfless, and who is almost a saint-like Lazzaro can’t survive in this capitalist world where greed and selfishness are the qualities that humans must have in order to survive. Lazzaro must die and by which he becomes a lone wolf and goes to a better place.

Thanks for reading. Cheers.