Happy as Lazzaro

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

HAPPY AS LAZZARO   ***

Alice Rohrwacher

2018

IDEA:  Lazzaro, a guileless and obedient lumpenproletariat, experiences the ravages of Italian society. 

BLURB:  Ambitious and striking if perhaps a bit hemmed in by its reliance on archetypes, Happy as Lazzaro synthesizes a mélange of literary and cinematic traditions into something both modern and eternal. It begins as a kind of neorealist pastoral, dominated by hardscrabble scenes of agrarian life sensuous and urgent in their tactile 16mm form. Then, with the introduction of an imperious Marquise and her cosmopolitan clan, it gradually becomes torqued by magical realism and religious allegory, before moving north to Milan for a hefty dose of globalist 21^st-century Marxist critique. Threading through all of this is Lazzaro, the prototypical fool, whose unspoiled decency and permanent guilelessness Rohrwacher renders as supernatural traits. In her masterstroke, she makes Lazzaro literally unchanging, not only in character but in appearance, so that even as unquantifiable stretches of time and space pass and the other characters age, he remains the same blissfully unaware sprite. Like other works dealing in anachronism and temporal ambiguity, Happy as Lazzaro employs its immortal titular character to comment on an essentially timeless condition: in this case, the existence of capitalist exploitation. Even though he is the only one who remains fixed in time, the stasis of Lazzaro functions as a mirror to the society he navigates, whose geographical and technological progression masks a calcified socioeconomic hierarchy. The poor, exploited labor of the film’s rural setting are still poor and disenfranchised in its urban one, and the class divisions outlined in its first half are only entrenched in its second. Rohrwacher places this critique in the realm of fable, which sometimes lends it a heavy-handed, schematic feeling but also creates possibilities for thinking about our fraught present on more discursively expanded terms.