Happy as Lazzaro
Lazzaro Felice
Alice Rohrwacher (2018)
The writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s parable of the vices of contemporary society, showing at the London Film Festival, isn’t short of older cultural references. The title character’s name translates as Lazarus. An important part of the story derives from the legend of St Francis of Assisi and the Wolf of Gubbio. Halfway through Happy as Lazzaro, the young hero, good as his name, rises from the dead – the main justification for describing the film, as plenty of critics have, as a magic realist fable. That seems to mean, in this case, making use of supernatural elements in order to give a fanciful lift to grim political themes that a non-magical realistic treatment would render unrelievedly dismaying.
The first half of the story takes place in the countryside, the second in the city. The rural setting is an isolated village, ironically named Inviolata, and its mountain environs. Although the time is the recent past, perhaps the last decade of the last century, the locals’ way of life – their rudimentary living conditions and credulous superstitions – reflect much older traditions. They work on a tobacco plantation – it later emerges as unpaid labour. Sharecropping has been illegal for years but the Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), the tobacco-magnate plantation owner, has flouted the law since 1977, when floods in the region left her estate inaccessible from the outside world (and her malpractice inviolable).
It’s not only because the workers’ true circumstances aren’t immediately revealed that the viewer doesn’t get an impression of slave labour: the atmosphere is too torpid for that. In the early stages, Alice Rohrwacher’s narrative is as uneventful and its tempo as slow as the rhythm of the sharecroppers’ lives but she gradually develops a focus on the relationship between Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), one of the younger peasants, and Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), the Marchesa’s wilful, entitled son. Tancredi has bleached hair, a miniature dog called Ercole (more irony) and time on his hands. He decides to pretend to have been kidnapped. Receiving a ransom note, his mother is amusingly unimpressed: she’s sure Tancredi’s faking it – just like the time when he feigned leprosy.
The benign, acquiescent Lazzaro gets the jobs none of the other peasants wants, such as guarding the chicken coop against wolves, and Tancredi takes a liking to him largely because Lazzaro is so easy to exploit. Tancredi doesn’t fancy drawing his own blood in order to give the ransom note a drop of credibility; Lazzaro obligingly cuts himself instead. The latter has made a kind of lair for himself in the mountains above Inviolata: Tancredi holes up there, listening to his Walkman and vainly waiting for his mother to pay the ransom. One day, the usually sure-footed Lazzaro is walking in the mountains when he trips and falls, apparently to his death. A man-eating wolf arrives on the scene. Like its Gubbio ancestor, the animal is pacified by the presence of goodness (which presumably made Lazzaro an inspired choice to protect the chickens too). The wolf leaves Lazzaro’s body alone and goes on its way.
A few screen moments later, Lazzaro comes to and picks himself up. He walks down the mountain, back through the now virtually deserted De Luna estate and all the way to the nearest city. En route he comes upon a group of immigrant refugees. In the city, as he stares at the first television screen he’s ever set eyes on, a TV news report explains how the Marchesa’s crimes came to light and were punished. Lazzaro has walked into the future. Physically quite unchanged himself, he soon encounters others from the Inviolata community, all aged by the passage of years. Peasants from the estate are now part of a living-rough urban colony. When Lazzaro encounters Ercole (or a new version of him), he realises Tancredi can’t be far away. The skinny young aristocrat has turned into a paunchy debauchee (Tommaso Ragno), fallen on (relatively) hard times.
Like its protagonist, the film takes on a new lease of life in the second half. This includes plenty more incident than the first, as well as more definite political bite. This viewer struggled, however, to understand Rohrwacher’s scheme even on its own unrealistic terms. There’s a nice moment when Lazzaro’s rustic knowledge identifies plants growing on waste ground as herbs rather than the weeds the townie petty criminal Ultimo (Sergi López) assumes them to be. Once he knows this, Ultimo, as enterprising as he’s desperate, reckons the herbs good enough not only to eat but to sell. I didn’t get why Antonia (Alba Rohrwacher, Alice’s sister), whom Lazzaro knew on the estate as a teenage girl (Agnese Graziani), was sharp enough to cheat a well-meaning middle-class woman out of cash but then insisted on using the group’s very limited funds to buy expensive pastries for a visit to the apartment where Tancredi and his similarly spoiled sister now reside. Rohrwacher perhaps means to illustrate how the peasants remain in thrall to their former oppressors (and that the latter are as ready as ever to exploit their goodwill) but Antonia doesn’t seem the best choice of character to demonstrate this.
In a striking episode close to the end of the film, Lazzaro and the have-nots are drawn to a church by the sound of beautiful music coming from it. When they enter the place, chilly nuns tell them a private service is taking place and that they’re not welcome. As they leave, the church organist discovers that his instrument has gone mute. Outside, the music persists in the air for a little while. The symbolism of the scene works well enough in a negative sense – the church’s loss of music is just desserts for its dismissal of those who wanted to partake of that music but were rejected as infra dig. What, though, does it mean in symbolic terms for the deprived to hear the organ strains outside the church but for these to be transient?
At this point too, Antonia announces that she and the others are going to return to Inviolata and make a new life there. Why didn’t they think of doing so before – except that it didn’t suit Alice Rohrwacher? She needs them out of the way now to clear the stage for Lazzaro’s big last scene. On their visit to the De Lunas’ apartment, the sister tells the former sharecroppers that she and Tancredi have been brought low by the banks that are the true villains of the modern world. Lazzaro therefore goes into a bank to confront the enemy. Asked if he’s armed, he truthfully says yes; the bank security assume his weapon is a gun rather than the country boy’s sling he’s actually carrying. He’s wrestled to the ground and other bank customers then proceed to beat him to death. In the film’s final sequence, a wolf reappears, sniffs round Lazzaro’s corpse, turns tail and runs out of the city.
I wasn’t sure if Rohrwacher meant the viewer to wonder, as I did, if Lazzaro might again rise again. I was pretty sure she felt it was more important that we recognise that capitalism is enduringly exploitative and tends viciously to corrupt. There may well be plenty in Happy as Lazzaro to characterise the social and moral ills being described as specifically Italian; if so, they were lost on me. It should be said in the film’s favour that Adriano Tardiolo is gently magnetic and wonderfully natural throughout as the holy fool Lazzaro. There are good supporting performances from Sergi López and another middle-aged actor called Natalino Balasso.
17 October 2018