Can you make an exquisite portrait of goodness that maintains beautiful qualities but continues to reflect a world laden with misery and to a certain extent impossible to change? It’s tricky terrain, a small mistake in calibrating the tone and you are left with something really fake or terribly cheesy. Bobbin lace has to be precise. But if you do, you have an extraordinary job on your hands.
This is what Alice Rohrwacher achieves with her films, which can often be described as film fables because of how they are anchored in fanciful stories. Although the investigation of her in the social drama makes them also become great exercises in magical realism that disarm you and they are not false at any time in their portraits. Let’s take ‘Happy Lazzaro’ as a great example.
happy in innocence
The Italian filmmaker’s film can be seen streaming through Filmin, and it’s a good opportunity to do so since she herself is back with ‘the chimera‘, which is part of the official section of the Cannes Film Festival. Rohrwacher thus returns to the festival that has consolidated it as one of the most interesting authorssince almost all of his films and even some of his recommendable shorts can be seen there.
‘Happy Lazzaro’ refers to the kindhearted peasant who lives in La Inviolata, a remote Italian village cut off from the rest of the country. There, a perfect bubble has been created where a marquise exploits a group of peasants, oblivious to the progress that is taking place and still living in a latifundia model where this family works the land for sad compensation and the possibility of living. This family welcomes Lazzaro, although exploit their hardworking will and kindness in a lighter way than the owners of the fief make them.
The end of sharecropping in Italy was not decreed until 1982, and these situations were very common. Rohrwacher takes advantage of it to build a social cinema loaded with a fantastic component, with a protagonist with qualities of a saint but without magical abilities. His attempt to positively influence those with whom he is close comes almost in a bucolic and almost magical version of ‘Forrest Gump’, or rather in the Dougie Jones who has replaced Dale Cooper for much of season 3 of ‘ Twin Peaks’.
‘Happy Lazzaro’: working miracles in a failing system
The way in which Rohrwacher presents the situation of this peasant family and of Lazzaro feels far out of time and space. It can almost be located, but at the same time there is a restlessness in the very careful atmosphere, which prevents us from talking about a story from the past. When the film takes a change placing our protagonist in an Italy very different from the one he knows, the shock is great, although the problems are not too different.
The misery that the director reflects shows with incredible eloquence how our present is not so far from the past, and she does so through a character who tries to do her best, although she cannot help but want to go back. The economic system works miracles much more perverse than those that our protagonist can develop, and Rohrwacher will know how to translate it into a beautiful movie, which handles tone well and is exquisitely shot. Deserving of much more than the script award she received at the French festival.
In Espinof | The 2023 Cannes Film Festival starts and there are 7 great reasons to expect a spectacular edition